magento - adding design template or adding static blocks to magento programmatically

Question

Is there any way to remotely make changes to the core_config_data besides directly making updates into the MySQL database?

There is SOAP/REST, but it does not seem to have methods to make core config data changes.

The intention is to make some core_config_data changes in the backend to add static blocks or changing/adding templates programmatically.

Answer 1

Sadly there is nothing in the API for this but I have used an install script from a module to create blocks and change config values. This has working very well for my situation.

For config values you can call the following from a setup script:

Mage::getModel('core/config')->saveConfig('path/to/config', 'value');

For detailed information about setup scripts I would suggest reading Alan Storm's great blog