[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #32470: Abstracting the Widget Classes

[WordPress Trac]

#32470: Abstracting the Widget Classes
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 Reporter:  welcher                 |       Owner:
     Type:  enhancement             |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal                  |   Milestone:  Awaiting Review
Component:  Widgets                 |     Version:
 Severity:  normal                  |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  dev-feedback has-patch  |     Focuses:
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Comment (by jdgrimes):

 Replying to [comment:27 Frank Klein]:
 > The proposed patch by @jacobsantos seems interesting, but it also is a
 lot of code movement. This means that it probably won't make it into a
 release very fast, as a lot of testing would have to be done. But yes, it
 will still certainly need lots of testing.

 I think @jacobsantos intends to maintain full backward compatibility. And
 I think that he's also committed to writing unit tests and integration
 tests, since that is part of the reason he is proposing these changes.

 > Also when working on new abstractions, we need to keep in mind which
 classes and methods are currently public. We would need to ensure that
 some form of backwards compatibility is maintained, because currently
 nothing keeps developers from directly accessing this code in their
 projects.
 >
 > In the meantime, I think we could have tangible benefits by doing
 smaller changes, like for example:
 > - Making `WP_Widget` an abstract class.
 > - Marking the methods that need to be overriden as `abstract`.
 > - Marking functions that should not be overriden as `final`.
 > - Marking private functions as `private`.
 >
 > Like that we could progress while working on a larger refactoring.
 >
 > Why not keep this ticket around for the larger overall planning, and
 have a ticket with a smaller scope to go along with #23012, focussing on
 improvements to `WP_Widgets` and `WP_Widget_Factory` that can be done
 right now.

 None of those changes are backward compatible (though for some we could
 employ hacks to make them more so). I think when this larger refactoring
 is complete, most of those changes won't matter anyway, because many of
 the old methods will probably only be there for back-compat anyway. So it
 might not be worth the time to do most of them. There might be other
 incremental improvements that could be made, though.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/32470#comment:28>
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