[wp-hackers] comments should be a plugin

[Mike Schinkel]

On Mar 6, 2010, at 10:32 PM, Ptah Dunbar wrote:
> I'm all +1 on removing cruff to make WP more lean, but I really don't even see any point for this conversation to take place. Instead, you guys might have better luck discussing the removal of all the importers (to become canonical plugins) before even thinking about removing something essential like comments. Lets just be realistic here.

Since you bring it up, let me say why making comments a canonical plugin would have benefit (although I don't have strong feelings about comments, this is just a general principle.)  Right now there are many things that are hard coded and very difficult to change if someone really needs to.  By moving in the direction of making more currently core functionality into canonical plugins the issues which make flexible usage difficult will be minimized.  

As an example right now WordPress 3.0 has 5 "core" post types: post, page, attachment, revision and nav_menu_item.  It's currently architected to assume they are there which means that, for example, if I were to remove the "post" type I create undefined conditions such as a "Posts" menu that has "Add New" and that errors out when I try to add one. By having (previously) "core" functionality like "Posts" and "Comments" in canonical plugins those broken edge cases are much more likely to be worked out by the core dev team instead of individually by everyone who needs it and has the resources to work on it.

FWIW.

-Mike