For a long time I've had trouble with syncing my project because the remote host would update the file modified timestamp to the time of the upload. This means that PHPed's sync would consider it to be newer, filling the transfer log with potentially hundreds of "Smart Skip: target file is newer..." messages, making those that actually got uploaded very hard to find. I thought this was a flaw in my FTP server, Filezilla, but upon checking up on the FTP protocol, I now know this isn't the case. It's up to the client, PHPed, to send the MFMT command to set the modified timestamp.

When a file is uploaded, could PHPed please set the modified timestamp on the remote file to be the same as the local file?

Unfortunately, FTP protocol is very old, slow, and misses many really important things such as file listing, set remote file modification time/access rights and many many other things. All you might hear about MFCT, MFF, MFMT, MDTM etc are custom commands neither proposed in RFC959 (the FTP basis) nor in any other RFCs. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but they are only listed in the document with draft status. Therefore most of the ftp servers running these days will be shocked on these commands. For example vsftpd shipped with CentOS 5 supports only the following commands:

as you see MFMT is not among them...

Honestly, I would recommend to stop using ftp and switch to sftp.

Thank you, I wish other companies would give answers like that!

I learnt about this by asking on the Filezilla support forums actually, I assumed it was an FTP server bug, so there's one that supports it - but AFAIK, Filezilla is only really used for personal servers like mine.

I would switch if I could - I've mentioned this before. I'd really like to be able to make an account and set the type to be "Local file system". I can't use the project code I am actually editing as it is part of a subversion repository and if I used it for testing, I'd have to set my project's own config file to suit my machine - but of course, the repository should have a clean default config file. Also, Smarty templates and file uploads would get included in the repository or at the very least, add unnecessary entries in my project explorer. This should also allow Windows Networking, so \\PConLAN\\server\root\ could be the address you publish to.

At present, I am running Filezilla server all the time, solely to be able to copy files to a testing directory from within Nusphere PHPed, something which I will do many, many times in one session. This seems silly, is there a better way to do it? Adding such an account would be a very simple class to implement surely, it's just the operating system's standard file library.