[wp-hackers] Degrading gracefully with deactivated plugins?

[Firas D.]

Owen Winkler wrote:

> Can we please not add any of these strange functions and just provide 
> better documentation for switching themes, upgrading, and applying 
> plugins, and be sure that authors of themes and plugins adhere to 
> developer guidelines regarding these issues?  Isn't it the expectation 
> of a user, who added those function in the first place, that the 
> functions the plugin provides will stop working when they disable the 
> plugin?  How stupid are we going to assume WordPress users are?
>
> I'm tired of providing support for other people's poorly crafted 
> themes (and there are suddenly a *lot* of them now, thanks) that don't 
> work with my plugins because they're not built with any nod to 
> compatibility.

What happens when I turn off a plugin that I've put a call to in my 
template? My site dies quite ungracefully, and if outputting errors to 
the browser is off, I don't know what's wrong and my CSS screws up 
because the HTML stopped being outputted upon the undeclared function 
fatal issue. This is an experience issue for end users, not a 
get-out-of-jail-free issue for theme devs.

My point is that it's not stupid to stumble across this issue. Switch 
theme, rid yourself of a plugin, switch to your previous theme (with its 
customized templates) after a while. I dunno, there are many many ways 
one could come across this despite not being stupid, and I've personally 
seen a handful of questions on #wordpress as a result of this; usually 
their errors are off and their site looks hideous because of the 
half-applied CSS.