blazerlocal

If it’s your own personal website, switching to a different host is easy enough, but in these cases, it’s not my own personal website – it’s a website that I, in one case, am doing for my employer, and, in another case, a website I’m working on for a client. They want to control the servers on which their website is hosted and don’t want to spend the time to actually customize them any more than they already have. It’s annoying as hell, but it is what it is and there’s not much I can do about it.

Besides, WordPress already partially caters to people with less than ideal webhosts. A good webhost would have the ftp extension installed, for example, yet WordPress includes a pure-PHP implementation of FTP to cater to those who don’t have a good webhost all the same. Why not do the same thing for SFTP? Or maybe you think WordPress should remove it’s pure-PHP FTP implementation and tell those who were using that feature to screw themselves? Hell – at that point, you might as well make WordPress installations quit prematurely if the server isn’t running the latest version of Suhosin and the latest PHP 5.3 release candidate. If it takes your webhost two days to upgrade, your WordPress installation will be down for two days! Wheee!!!

I have TWO web hosts – let’s call them webhost A and webhost B. They are described thusly:

Webhost A:
I have SSH/SFTP access but the ssh2 extension is not installed. I don’t have FTP access, either.

Webhost B:
I do not have an SSH account but the ssh2 extension is installed. I do, however, have an FTP account, but because WordPress doesn’t let you pick and chose which method you want to use, I can’t use it. WordPress is ONLY prompting me for SFTP information and I believe it should instead be asking you which method you want to use – not auto-detect it.

Also, to quote from my earlier post:

i have access to two different servers

So, TWO web hosts and TWO different questions / complaints (one question / complaint for each of the two web hosts). I’ll confess that I wasn’t very clear on that in my first post and apologize for that…

Now, I am fully capable of commenting out the appropriate lines to resolve the issue on webhost B, but I don’t believe I should have to. Certainly a good installer wouldn’t require it. And for webhost A… imho, WordPress should include a pure-PHP SFTP implementation. Just like it does for FTP. WordPress uses the ftp extension if it’s installed and it’s own implementation, otherwise. Why doesn’t it do that for SFTP?