[wp-hackers] Streamlining Includes

[Ryan Boren]

On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Aaron Harun <admin at anthologyoi.com> wrote:
> The major problem I see is that for blogs with a lot of plugins,
>  everything would be defined anyway because all activated plugins would
>  still be loaded by default, so the only time this would have any real
>  benefit is when just code that is rarely used by the core as well as
>  plugins is removed.

Not everyone uses a bunch of plugins.  I use only one.

>  Even if each plugin only included what it needed, the entirety of the
>  core would be included because on or another plugin would have needed
>  it regardless of whether the plugin is actually useful. (For example,
>  an Admin panel add-on is included no matter what page you are on.)

Plugins shouldn't  load their admin code in a non-admin context.

>  Part of optimizing the core may require that plugins "announce" what
>  they do, so WordPress knows how to respond: when plugins are
>  activated, they should define their functionality to WordPress. This
>  could be as simple as adding a list of functionality in the header of
>  each file that WordPress can store as part of the plugin data.
>  That AJAX plugin might have "Functions: posts, comments" while the
>  Simple Tags plugin might use "Functions: tagging, admin."

That's pretty much what I'm proposing.  Define groups of
functionality, such as 'edit-posts', and the necessary files are
included.  Plugins already have a way of knowing if they are in an
admin context.  if  (is_admin())
require_once('my-admin-functions.php').  Plugins should take care of
organizing their includes so that only the necessary stuff is loaded
for a given context.