Plug-Ins
Plug-ins would become useful because it would give developers the opportunity to embrace the expandability of a program, without needing to keep asking developers for new features. Plug-ins could include changes the interface of the program, or how the program handles files. Plug-ins could include support for special calls on ftp servers, and also compatbility with special operating system-only functions not covered by wxwidgets. I could go off and make a plug-in to detect .htaccess files and allow for a gui confguration of it, for instance.
Themeing
Why not. Why not make an ftp browser themeable like winamp? Not only let people change the style, but where things are placed. Make the themes based of XML sheets and png files.
Scripts
The thing that boggles my mind is exactly why ftp clients don't support scripting. Let's say I listed the contents in a directory, but I only wanted to see a regex match, I would have the option to enable a script to view directories that way. Not only this, scripts could allow for site-wide changes and file manipulation, if someone wanted to name *.htm to *.html on their server, they could use a script to browse the directories they wanted to and the client would automagically do so. People like phpBB could give CHMOD macro scripts to automatically chmod all the files to the developer's specifications for optimum security. It would also be possible for a scriptlet to allow for configuration, upload, and chmod'ing of a script.
/phpBB
- filezilla_install.script
- /upload
filezilla_install.script would launch filezilla and ask for the target server, connect, then allow you to create and navigate to the target directory. From there, file_zilla will be instructed to launch a mini-window to replace the configuration settings in the conf file. After the upload is complete, the script will allow launching of default browser and/or give url to the location of the phpbb install script (for the sql part).
OR another route you can take is communicating with the actual server after upload through the script. You could make the script output options on confirming to install the sql queries (which is done by a php file made by the developers)... and from there you actually can have COMPLETE script installation from your home PC. Ofcourse, this could only work if the developer made his script compatible for this, it is one of the possibilities that scripting has.
DirectEditing
One of the most god-like features of ftp-clients nowadays can be direct editing. I'm not quite sure if direct editing is actually editing a file live, but for ascii files, it wouldn't hurt to simple open up a file in a pane, edit it, and save back the ftp. Do you know how handy that is to people?
This is the kind of stuff developers can get mad over, this would take a collossol amount of work to acheive, but if you really look into your heart, maybe it's a cool idea.
Exandability, Configurability, Themeing? LiveEditing?
What about.. if that's too hard:
Just a plug-in API (I don't know what API means, but I hear it when I talk about plug-ins in application and such, Apple Pizza Iterator is what it really means), but yeah, A plug-in API that could support the development of DirectEdit, A theme system, and scriptability.
Other than that, most smart people I know use pirated FTP clients (at least on windows). Why? Well, I have bad friends, they don't know what linux is, which makes me depressed. Can you all make me happy by doing some of these? Or should I just go cry while I run emerge -uDavt.
Love,
Your Fan,
Tony
