Views From The Hill

One of my recent annoyances with Wordpress is its instance on prompting me for my FTP password when installing and upgrading plugins. This is especially annoying when you have a half dozen plugins to update. I wanted a way to save my FTP password so I could skip the authentication step and just update the plugin.

Looking online, the most common solution was to edit the wp-config.php file to include some static definitions. James has a blog post describing how to set these values in your Wordpress configuration, however the gist of it is to append the following to the file:

/*  WordPress FTP Information (For removing the constant password request on plugin install and removal) */
 
define("FTP_HOST", "mywebsite.com");
define("FTP_USER", "username");
define("FTP_PASS", "mypassword");

However, this solution isn’t so great as it requires you to edit your configuration file, which makes it difficult to be used by those new to Wordpress and makes it unwise to use as a method for WordpressMU. A better solution, in my option, is to create a plugin which pulls and pushes data to the ftp_credentials configuration entry already stored in the Wordpress database. The below plugin does just that, allowing you to permanently save your Wordpress FTP information without the need to manually edit your configuration files.

Download:

ftpinfo_plugin-0.0.2
ftpinfo_plugin-0.0.1