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pressfs – Dipping a Toe into Write Support

When I first announced pressfs I knew that write support was going to come up as a requested feature. As I mentioned in that post, before I made the initial release I’d already been working with write code. After more testing and code clean up I’ve updated pressfs to version 0.2.0, which has (very) limited write support.

And by limited, I mean really, really, really limited.

There are exactly two things that you can edit using pressfs in version 0.2.0: post content and a the url value for a user account (under contact info). Example paths for these looks like:

/var/wp/users/LOGIN/url
/var/wp/posts/POSTID-POSTNAME/content

I knew that post content was something people wanted to be able to edit, and adding another field that wasn’t related to posts made me think about how to properly abstract the code that determines which files are writable.

While I’ve tested this repeatedly against my dev install of WordPress, I can’t stress enough that you need to be careful. Read only is pretty safe, with no real way to mess up your WordPress install. Now that we are venturing into the write waters the code needs more people to test it before I’d consider it safe.

Now, with that out of the way, go give this a try – the pressfs code is available on github. Creating a new mount point is easy enough, and I recommend using a non-root account to do it. If your uid is 3000 it is as simple as:

python pressfs.py /var/wp/ -o uid=3000

And if you do find a problem, use the -d option to have pressfs run in the foreground, it will display filesystem activity and python errors.