[wp-testers] Deleting Categories

[Owen Winkler]

Chris Haynes wrote:
> Is adding just a "edit" button for a category that has zero posts in it
> difficult?  Does this require a lot of code to write?

Ok - You must first detect whether a category has posts in it.  You 
can't do that well when the page loads because you might have other 
users adding posts while you are editing (maybe not your blog, but 
certainly other blogs that use WordPress would have this problem).

So you would need to do that with Ajax.  Construct the javascript 
structures to make the request to the server, have the server run the 
request in PHP to detect any existing posts, and then return a response 
- possibly asking if they are sure they want to edit/delete that 
category, possibly redirecting them to a new page to perform the edit, 
possibly telling them they can't do it because that category has posts. 
  And what is the app to do if they're in the middle of editing that 
post, but they need to redirect to a different page?

This becomes even more challenging with categories that were originally 
added via ajax since they will need to have all of those extra event 
handlers added to also support the ajax editing.  Also, the original 
HTML output can't necessarily contain those edit links next to each 
category in the list because if the browser doesn't have javascript 
enabled, then the links won't work via ajax.  Plus, you need to respect 
category-editing permissions...  Does the scope seem more expansive than 
you originally thought?

Yes, it can be done.  Yes, it's probably more than 10 lines of code.

In terms of overall difficulty, I'm sure that someone familiar with the 
ajax tools that WordPress provides could do it inside an hour or so.  I 
think there are maybe 3-4 people with that knowledge, though, and it 
would still need to be tested more thoroughly because it's been my 
experience that nothing written using ajax works perfectly on the first 
try.  Usually not the second try, either.

I'm not saying the idea is bad - I actually like it.  I'm just trying to 
put into perspective the work that this type of request would generate, 
and why it hasn't suddenly been committed like a lot of other things 
have recently.

Owen