[wp-hackers] Adding A CSS Loader

[Jamie Holly]

I just spent the weekend on a couple of sites I manage going through plugins
and stripping out all the CSS so it can all be contained within 1 file.
Considering the number of plugins using their own style rules, I was
thinking that perhaps we could take another lesson from something Drupal has
done recently and works great - A CSS loader. 

 

Basically we would create a function, add_css('stylesheet_location'), or
something similar. This would store all the css files in an array which
would be dumped out with the proper format during the head call. What this
would also allow is for us to create a caching mechanism for all the CSS
files. Basically we could have Wordpress combine all the CSS files into a
master CSS file and then save that file in the cache directory. This would
reduce the number of calls to the server to load X number of style sheets
from each plugin that requires them.

 

We shouldn't have any legacy issues with this really, as those could still
require upon the head hook to inject their CSS (same applies to dynamic CSS
files). It would also require themes remove the CSS from their header.php
file for this to work, but if they don't then there is no problem, it will
just fallback to the current method. Since the theme's CSS file will also
remain stored with the theme, we can also continue to utilize the head
section of the CSS file for theme information.

 

Thoughts?

 

Jamie Holly

http://www.intoxination.net