[wp-hackers] front-page.php always overrides home.php?

[Chip Bennett]

> That said I doubt you'd get much committer traction. The current situation
> is seen as workable because WP is popular despite it, and there is little
> love for purely semantic changes to core most of the time.

I think the problem is that the committers might not be "in the trenches"
enough to see that a nomenclature problem *does* exist. I see the confusion
occasionally in Themes submitted to the repository. (I see it *far* more
often in the code of so-called "premium" Themes and in sketchy free Themes
that I occasionally have the displeasure of reviewing.) I see it in the
WPORG support forums, by end users.

Maybe I'll put in a ticket, and see what discussion develops...

Chip

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 8:05 AM, Jeremy Clarke <jer at simianuprising.com>wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Chip Bennett <chip at chipbennett.net>
> wrote:
>
> > To follow up, here's what I'm thinking of submitting as a patch:
> >
> > Replace is_home() with is_posts_index() - or is_posts() or
> is_blog_index()
> > or is_blog()
> > Replace home.php with posts.php - or posts-index.php or blog.php
> >
> >
> I'm late to the game but I just want to say: This is exactly right and
> would
> be a huge improvement to the semantic usability of the
> conditionals/templates involved.
>
> As soon as WP had these two conditionals existing at the same time it was a
> problem. There should never have been two flags like this with such
> obviously redundant names. "home" and "front_page" refer to the exact same
> thing here (the root of the domain/landing page up on arrival), even if the
> code has them doing different things. As you point out it's almost funny
> and
> ironic that the only functional difference between the two is that one of
> them specifically applies when the home/front-page *meaning* is inverted
> and
> you are not on the 'homepage' of the site.
>
> is_home should have been changed to is_posts or is_posts_index as soon as
> front_page was added, or preferably, home could have been used as
> 'front-page' and a 'posts index' could have been the 'new'
> template/conditional that was added, which would have made sense!
> Unfortunately at the time they seem to have been focussing on the
> functionality rather than the semantics, which is a lesson for the future
> if
> nothing else.
>
> FWIW since those days there has been really high-quality debates around
> these kinds of semantic issues when new stuff is added, and the result is a
> lot less naming madness. Even if you don't like how naming in the
> CPT/Multisite etc. areas have gone down, they were discussed deeply and the
> results are usually workable if not ideal for everyone.
>
>
>
> > So, two questions:
> >
> > 1) Is this reasonable to mark up as a patch and submit a Trac ticket, or
> is
> > it a waste of time?
> >
> >
> I think having a ticket about the subject would be good, as the issue will
> never go away until someone is willing to deprecate "*home*" as used in
> this
> context. IMHO a nice long deprecation period should make it
> not-unreasonable
> to one day be rid of it, and cleaning up the core code would probably make
> it a lot easier to understand (since the labels would make more sense)
>
> That said I doubt you'd get much committer traction. The current situation
> is seen as workable because WP is popular despite it, and there is little
> love for purely semantic changes to core most of the time.
>
> --
> Jeremy Clarke • jeremyclarke.org
> Code and Design • globalvoicesonline.org
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