I spent the good part of the day installing and updating the FrakMedia! Network Servers with PHP 5.3.0. That also including updating all the other sites that are on the server, but one of the more important things for me here on this site is WordPress and the ability to use SSH2 as the transfer protocol for plugins, core, and themes.

PECL by default if you were trying the ‘pecl install ssh2-beta‘ command you get an error message saying that it doesn’t work. Duh!

But as usual the system was broken. So it took now ~12 hours for me to find and get it fixed. However, I had to do some heavy searching in order get it to work and I am going to give it out right now on how to get it working!

If it does, you are in luck! Or your server (like mine hosting this blog) has FTP/FTPS disabled and only uses SSH2 for shell and file transfers, you are even more luck!

Working with the WordPress dev team in IRC (irc.freenode.net, #wordpress-dev) and after becoming frustrated that I couldn’t use the automatic plugin upgrade feature and the new core update feature that is coming out for version 2.7.x, I took it upon myself to start writing a SSH2 transfer protocol class file. Along with a few people in the channel (in particular DD32) we have completed this major task in getting it working. (Check the status of it’s progress in this trac ticket.)