I spent some time today working on a WordPress implementation for a political candidate. It’s basically a vanilla WP install fit inside their existing shell, with a few of my hacks: WP Last Visit, WP Photos, WP Unformatted and my unreleased home page caching hack.
This was my first extended experience with WordPress 1.2 (I’ve been busy on another project) and I ended up re-writing much of my WP Photos hack to make it fairly 1.2 plugin compatible.
One thing I don’t get about the WP 1.2 plugins, they all generally give you new functionality that you expose by adding tags, etc. into the template. If someone then disables the plugin without removing those tags, their blog will break. The plugin enabling/disabling mechanism is nice and interactive (and it makes people feel good), but I think it gives them the false impression that they can control more than they actually can by simply clicking things on and off on the plugins page.
Also, why isn’t there an ‘Enabled’ checkbox column instead of the Enable/Disable link? The click-click-click to make changes isn’t too bad, but a single click to apply all changes would be nicer. I wonder how the rest of the dev team would feel about doing it that way.
Back on topic, it was fun doing the implementation and revisiting some code I haven’t looked at in a while. Also, I should have a 1.2 compatible version of WP Photos released later this week.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Chris Pederick adds this Comment:
I thought exactly the same thing about the enabling/disabling of plugins.
I even disabled a plugin thinking that it would just stop that piece of content showing, but of course the whole blog broke.
Maybe it’s something they can fix for a future release.
June 2nd, 2004 at 1:02 am
Visual Grammar adds this Trackback:
I Concur!
Doing my usual reading rounds, i had these thoughts:
I feel totally the same as Alex. I was doing some testing the other day and i was thinking to myself that it was kinda bothersome and inefficient that i had to click activate/deactivate on one plu…
June 2nd, 2004 at 11:44 am
Blogging Pro - Blog News, Tools and Hacks adds this Trackback:
WordPress Tip: Keeping A Development Log
Alex King brings up a good point about activating and deactivating plugins. Most plugins that you implement require some sort of code to be placed in the index.php file. Once you activate the plugin you’re ready to go. But when you turn off the plugin…
June 2nd, 2004 at 12:11 pm
danithew adds this Comment:
Looking forward to the upcoming release of WP-Photos for 1.2. It’s interesting to read your thoughts and criticques on the Wordpress 1.2 system. I honestly haven’t gotten my 1.2 plugins working yet but will at some point get around to it. I’ve been momentarily (and probably unnecessarily) confused by the use of the term directory in “wp-admin/plugins directory.” I think it’s just talking about the plugins.php “file” (which is what I’ve been calling these. I thought a directory would be a file folder of some sort. But that shows how much I know about programming or coding.
June 3rd, 2004 at 12:37 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
The plugins go in the wp-content/plugins directory.
June 3rd, 2004 at 12:39 pm
Chad Cooper adds this Comment:
I too had this problem with a plugin causing my blog to crash…this is interesting and I need to look into it more. Not only did my index.php crash, but so did wp-login.php. I ftp’d into my directory, deleted the plugin, and everything now works fine…I’m going to look and see if that function call is still in there…it should be….hmmmm…….
June 3rd, 2004 at 2:56 pm
alexking.org: Blog adds this Trackback:
Custom Development
I’ve been working on a few custom development projects in the last few weeks. The WordPress implementation I mentioned previously is pretty close to going live and I’ve just finished adding some custom functionality to Tasks Pro™ for a cust…
June 9th, 2004 at 6:40 pm