Question

I am creating a .net application and I need to somehow find out the the version number of the latest stable release of WordPress.

Does anyone know if there is a way to get this?

Thanks

EDIT: I have just thought of a possible solution and will post here if pans out.

Answer 1

You should be able to do a HEAD against wordpress.org/latest.zip and parse the version number from the filename.

Here is an example:

var request = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create("http://wordpress.org/latest.zip");
request.Method = "HEAD";
using(var response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse()) 
{
    string contentDisposition = response.Headers["content-disposition"];    
    Match version = Regex.Match(contentDisposition, @"wordpress\-(.*?)\.zip$");
    if (version.Success) 
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Latest wordpress version: {0}", version.Groups[1].Value);
    }       
}

This is taking advantage of the fact that WordPress.org sets the filename in the Content-Disposition HTTP header to include the version number. Obviously, if WordPress changes this behaviour, this method will break.

We can do a HTTP HEAD to avoid downloading the file, the headers are enough for this task.