As someone who stores user passwords as a salted SHA2 hash where one part of the salt is randomly-generated and stored in the database and the other part is hard-coded into the controller for an application that has 5 users and gets maybe 10 hits a day, I hate FTP. It is completely insecure and I refuse to install it on any of our servers, especially when SFTP is a part of SSH anyway. Problem is, WordPress uses FTP for its fancy one-click installation of plugins and themes and upgrades. Enter One Click Plugin Updater, a plugin written by someone with a domain in Russia and/or Eastern Europe. How come a disproportionately large percentage of WordPress and Joomla plugins are written in Eastern Europe, Russia, or Southeast Asia? I don’t see many Rails plugins written in those geographic locations. Anyway, this plugin uses cURL to download plugins onto your server (make sure not to use the fopen option) so you get all the convenience of one-click installs without having to install an FTP server on your server.
Eric Tarn
Co-founder of Onepager and We Are NY Tech. I like to write Ruby, bike around, and eat stuff.
