[wp-hackers] Modifying admin forms via plugins

[Stephen O'Connor]

Owen... you made my day with that DOM comment. :D

And Jason... You hit the biggest problem with this framework: support. And
there is no easy solution here. I think it would be a good idea, as you
said, for this to be included with the WP-distrobution. It would provide
more security and peace of mind for developers and ease migrating issues for
end users.

But I also like the idea of keeping the two seperate. By developing this in
parellel with WP we can begin using it today (well, you might want to wait
until v1.0 comes out). ;) Also in the future an adventurous plugin author
could require an end user to have the v1.5 framework (yes, the framework
does version checking). The end-user just has to update two files without
worrying about the rest of wordpress or possible incompatiblities.

Maybe we should combine the two plans. Maybe the WP core should include a
stable version of the framework, but authors could theoretically specify an
updated version. I would honestly like to hear a dev speak about this before
making a decision.

I really agree with you Jason about your anti-file hacking philosophy. It is
a bad practice when plugin authors start digging their teeth into other
people's WP installs. However I feel this topic should be considered a bit
more complicated than a simple plugin. What I'm advocating changes the way
we view plugins at a fundamental level and helps both plugin authors and end
users in countless ways.

Wait until this weekend before deciding. I hope to have both framework v1.0
and my static posts plugin out there by meetup time. Let's see how the
general WP community reacts and plan from there and I wish everyone a safe
meetup. :D

- Stephen

-----Original Message-----
From: hackers-bounces at wordpress.org
[mailto:hackers-bounces at wordpress.org]On Behalf Of Jason goldsmith
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2004 10:34 AM
To: hackers at wordpress.org
Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Modifying admin forms via plugins


Owen - You can't use the DOM because plugins are disabled in
plugins.php. If plugins weren't then enabling a borked plugin would
require you going into the database and disabling it, or removing the
files from the plugins folder to unbork the plugin interface. So,
currently there is no way to do this in WordPress.

Stephen - I think the framework is cool, I'd love to use it, but I
won't be able to because it modifies WordPress files. I refuse to do
that for any plugin and there are two reasons why. 1) When WordPress
upgrades, my plugins would all break because the modified files would
be overwritten. That's no good. 2) As you have pointed out, I can't
include the framework with my plugin because my copy might be old, so
it might overwrite a newer one. This means I have to link to the
framework and explain to the end user that they should go download and
install some other piece of software to make the plugins work.

I think that something like the framework should be included with
WordPress. If Matt is working on one already, you two should talk and
work together so that 1.3 has a solid Plugin API and Framework so that
plugin developers can do super cool things easily. Then I could use
the plugin framework without fear of it breaking in a future release
or even worse, without fear of you getting too busy to update it for a
future release and forcing all of the plugin developers to scramble
and bicker over which unofficial update should become the official
update so that everyone who is using the framework can upgrade to
WordPress 2.0 or whatever.

Btw, I think the plugin framework could easily define standard widgets
and a mechanism for tying them to options (it wouldn't even be
impossible to tie them to db backed or file backed options)  and then
providing a way to call custom defined elements. There's no reason for
each plugin developer to reinvent a way in code to tie a checkbox to
true or false and generate the checkbox and label in xhtml, but
definitely there are times when that won't be enough (my plugin Live
Press will make use of drop down lists that have to dynamically update
each other)

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