[theme-reviewers] Flash objects in themes

Otto otto at ottodestruct.com
Sat Oct 15 17:12:10 UTC 2011


On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Chip Bennett <chip at chipbennett.net> wrote:
> Best practice would be:
> 1) ALL php files have phpDoc header docblocks, that include @copyright and
> @license. Derivative works should declare the copyright and license of the
> original work, as well
> 2) ALL php file header docblocks include @package: theme-slug
> 3) All php function declarations should have phpDoc docblocks, and if the
> function is copy-pasta, it should include @copyright and @license from the
> original source, as well as an @link TO the original source, wherever
> possible
> I've tried to implement these best-practices in Oenology, so if anyone has
> any suggestions for improvement, please let me know, so I can update
> Oenology's inline docs.

Notable exception:

It is not uncommon to include the files from some other OSS package
entirely, in an unmodified state, or to include only the parts that
are required as opposed to the whole thing (since there can be
potential security issues when including unused files). This would
very likely be the case for including something like swfobject, where
it's just a "piece" of a site, meant to be included into other things
like themes and such.

I'd suggest that best practice for this case would be to:

a) include the 3rd-party package in a separate directory and reference
it from there
b) put a note in the readme.txt or license.txt or whatever providing a
link to the package's homepage

Ideally, in such a case, the files from the original package would be
unmodified, and you wouldn't want to impose things like docblock
requirements and such on them, since that adds a burden on including
packages from other projects which may have different standards.

-Otto


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