I had a .zip file in my plugin directory and the Plugin Manager page looked extremely funky. My guess is that EE is trying to load the .zip file in and display it as text.

IMHO, there should be a check in the loading code to ignore any non PHP file.

Does the zip file start with ‘pi.’ and have ‘php’ contained within it?  If so, then it passes our current validation check because all plugins start with ‘pi.’ and are typically of the .php, .php4, or .php5 file types.

We have decided in 2.0 to be a bit more picky about the form of plugins and extensions, so this will likely not be a problem for such files as yours in the future.

Yup. I was zipping up a plugin to send to someone, so I just right-clicked it and Created Archive (I am on a Mac).

I modified my response above to explain.  There is a check, and your file just so happens to seem valid.

Gotcha...I will try to refrain from naming files pi.e_recipe and such until then.

Well, that file name would be invalid as it does not contain ‘php’.

Housekeeping.