[wp-hackers] function_exists - user woes

[Brian Meidell]

Alex King wrote:

> "One thing I don’t get about the WP 1.2 plugins, they all generally give 
> you new functionality that you expose by adding tags, etc. into the 
> template. If someone then disables the plugin without removing those 
> tags, their blog will break. The plugin enabling/disabling mechanism is 
> nice and interactive (and it makes people feel good), but I think it 
> gives them the false impression that they can control more than they 
> actually can by simply clicking things on and off on the plugins page."

It must sound like I am on a plugging rampage with this easytags thing, 
but I really am not. I would probably use PHP myself in any case, and 
the plugin isn't something I feel strongly about. It took 5 minutes to 
write. It's just seems that I see a lot of problems mentioned that could 
be handled gracefully by this plugin, if only the preconditions are 
there (returning functions).

EasyTags fails gracefully if you were using a tag that relied on a 
plugin function. The result will be a HTML comment that saying that the 
field used was unknown.

If EasyTags itself was disabled, the litter left in the HTML code would 
be XML compliant tags whose biggest crime would be to break XHTML 
validation.

/Brian