I had downloaded Turnkey Wordpress 2.5 a couple of months back and set it up on a a VMware ESX system.

Shortly after installing it, I updated it to 2.8.4 myself following procedures documented on wordpress.org, although now I see that you have released a 2.8.4 appliance.

I do have some minor questions concerning my installation.

1.  Is there any way to take advantage of the auto-update/download/delete  features now offered for themes, plugins and the core Wordpress?  Seems like you need to use FTP, and I don't know if this is even possible with the Turnkey solution.

2.  As someone who is just learning his way around Linux, I'm curious why you use a symlink for the wp-content folder.  I know on hosted Wordpress installations it isn't that way.  I'm guessing this has to do with shared folder permissions, but I'd just like a better understanding.

3.  My Wordpress dashboard page does not correctly synchronize with the RSS feeds from Wordpress.org.  I get an error such as the following: 

RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: Could not open handle for fopen() to http://wordpress.org/development/feed/

My research on this seems to point back to the php.ini file.  Must change a line to this:

; Whether to allow include/require to open URLs (like http:// or ftp://) as files.
allow_url_include = On

The file I tried editing is /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini but it didn't solve the problem.  Is this the wrong version of php.ini or do I have to copy it somewhere else?  Or is this another issue altogether?

Are most of these issues handled better with your 2.8.4 Turnkey appliance?  If so, would I be better off exporting my installation and starting over with a new version of the appliance?