[wp-hackers] Modifying admin forms via plugins

[Owen Winkler]

> First, the additioanl hooks. So far most of these examples can be solved
> using the DOM. Yet people don't like the DOM... Um, tough? I personally
> would like the devs to work toward more meaningful goals than adding hooks
> to every three lines... How about an action/filter registry in WP? This
> would GREATLY help with backwards-compatibility.

Um, not all of us want to use the DOM to move nodes around if agreeing to
where a single plugin point should be inserted would eliminate a large
portion of these requests.  Solidifying the location of this plugin point
seems meaningful to me and, by extension, anyone who uses my plugin.

> And the plugin extensiblility/configuration/gui thing? Didn't I already do
> that? Somebody even mentioned "framework" in this discussion, which is
> perfect cause guess what I called it!
> 
> http://stevarino.com/wp/framework/

I like the look of the framework.  I suppose that if I implemented your
required class that my plugin would continue to work even for those who did
not use your framework.  Correct?

> The idea is super-user friendliness and maximizing modularity. I don't
> define 50 unique functions for this to work, just a normal plugin function
> and a new plugin class. Inside that class is where I store the UI,
> install,
> uninstall, and other methods to make it really easy for a user to figure
> out what's up.

There are a couple of tricks to this for me, though.

First, I don't want to write a config UI at all.  It would be a waste of
time to write a UI for plugin options that are simple user-entered settings.
If the framework included somewhat of a way to dump sections of the options
table into a form, I would call it vastly improved.

But then, if the WP user who installed my plugin doesn't use your framework,
I'll have to include a UI for them and a UI for the framework (admittedly,
these could be mostly the same, but then there's more overhead).  Can I
re-distribute your code with my plugin?  How does the WP user feel about
overwriting his plugins.php file?

I'd have no such issues if this framework was committed to a future version
of WordPress.

Owen