[wp-hackers] Some Left-Field names for Canonical Plugins

Mike Schinkel mikeschinkel at newclarity.net
Tue Dec 8 05:34:00 UTC 2009


On Dec 7, 2009, at 11:51 PM, Mark Jaquith wrote:
> 
> One of our concerns is to minimize the "what it says about all the
> other plugins" effect. We don't want everyone else to feel like
> they're being deprecated or downplayed. Imagine what people will call
> the plugins that aren't canonical, based on the names you consider.

Mark,

What's the purpose for these canonical plugins?  My assumption would be that they are there to provide functionality for specific use cases that are not applicable to the general purpose uses of WordPress.  For example might these plugins go to provide functionality along 

-- Membership sites
-- Multi-author professional publishing sites
-- Real-Estate focused sites
-- Advanced CMS functionality
-- Multimedia Gallery functionality
-- Facebook Connect
-- And so on...

If I'm in sync with what you are thinking then it would seem these are use-case specific plugins. Maybe they are "vertical plugins", "specialty plugins", "domain-specific plugins", or even "optional modules?" (The latter being a named I proposed before.) None of those cause the other plugins to be downplayed.

Also, will these canonical plugins be listed in special place in the admin console where there is actually a list of the plugins that can be enabled (so they don't have to be so hard to discover?) 

And could some of these canonical plugins offer functionality that is only of use to other plugin authors (i.e. a library of routines) instead of all of them being only with end-user functionality?

How will these canonical plugins be decided upon? Will existing ones be elevated, or will they be all new projects?

-Mike


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