[wp-hackers] Storing Arbitrary Data as Custom Post Types

[Mike Schinkel]

On Dec 8, 2009, at 8:11 PM, Christopher O'Connell wrote:
> Well, that's more or less where the canonical plugins come in: If each
> canonical plugin adheres to a specification for storing data (whether it is
> what I have proposed or something else) than other plugins could access the
> data of canonical plugins quite simply.

Exactly (assuming you mean that they agree on attribute naming as well as storage methodology, right?)

> The advantage of my proposed solution is that other plugins simply need to
> load the definition file from a canonical plugin (presumably somewhere in
> wp-plugins) in order to access that data.

Somewhere you'll need to map to a common name, though.  It's a chicken-and-egg problem (and one of the reasons that I have a big problem with the hypermedia constraint in the REST architecture, the one constraint that practically everyone ignores. But I digress.)


> Indeed I might go so far as to suggest that part of the requirements for
> canonical plugins is that those that store data do so in some consistent
> fashion.

+1, of course (again, assuming we mean the same thing.)

-Mike