I have a remote updater script that resides in my wordpress theme folder. The script simply calls out to the central server and grabs a zip file which contains the latest updated files for the theme.
I'd like to enable a nag alert checker that executes whenever the theme's options panel is accessed and I'm just brainstorming it here for a sanity check.
The nag checker would simply look out on my central server and read the contents of a text file which contains the current version number (a 4 digit integer, 0001, 0002, etc and that's it).
If the 4 digit number contained in the text file is greater than the version number stored in the theme's version variable, then it would display a nag alert for the user so that they can execute the update script to retrieve the update.
Am I on the right track? Are there better ways to do this that are easier to implement? I suppose I could check a date stamp on the local update file and compare it to the update file on the server as well. Not sure which is best or easiest.
That sounds good to me. You can use file_get_contents() on the local and remote files (containing the version numbers), use intval() on those, and then make the comparison. If file_get_contents() doesn't work on the remove url, then you'll have to use cURL.