[wp-hackers] Degrading gracefully with deactivated plugins?

[Owen Winkler]

Themes are supposed to be designed with certain standards in mind.  
They're not supposed to include enabled features from plugins.  It's 
perfectly ok to include commented functions for potential plugins, but 
you shouldn't require plugins for your theme.

If the issue is one of WordPress turning plugins on/off during an 
upgrade, then that's a WordPress bug, as noted earlier in this thread.

Can we please not add any of these strange functions and just provide 
better documentation for switching themes, upgrading, and applying 
plugins, and be sure that authors of themes and plugins adhere to 
developer guidelines regarding these issues?  Isn't it the expectation 
of a user, who added those function in the first place, that the 
functions the plugin provides will stop working when they disable the 
plugin?  How stupid are we going to assume WordPress users are?

I'm tired of providing support for other people's poorly crafted themes 
(and there are suddenly a *lot* of them now, thanks) that don't work 
with my plugins because they're not built with any nod to compatibility.

Owen