REM State

Well, folks, I’ve been working on another plugin. It’s tentatively called “Tinfoil Hat” (pending acceptance of the name at WordPress, with apologies to Filosofo), and its goal is to give you fine-grained control over how your WordPress installation contacts other sites on the Internet. You can grab the second draft (and initial documentation) as a preview. I’ve done preliminary testing, and everything should work as expected back to WordPress 2.1. The second draft provides tweakables for two WordPress features:

• WordPress 2.3 updates (won’t show up in earlier versions of WordPress)
  • Enable or disable checking for WordPress updates
  • Enable or disable checking for plugin updates
  • Whether or not to send the version of PHP when checking updates
  • Whether or not to send your PHP locale when checking updates
  • Whether or not to send your blog’s character encoding when checking updates
  • Allows you to spoof your blog URL when checking updates (empty = don’t send)
• Enable or disable loading news on the admin dashboard

If you know of any other WordPress functionality that pings the outside world (aside from posting pings, of course :), let me know.