[wp-hackers] Degrading gracefully with deactivated plugins?

[Mark Jaquith]

Owen Winkler wrote:

> You point out a couple of several issues that you could have with this 
> already.  First is that you have to pack all of the plugins your theme 
> uses with your theme, which I can imagine isn't fun for you from a 
> maintenance standpoint.  Additionaly, as you point out, you then have 
> to check the functions you've included to be sure that they don't 
> already have those functions installed.
>
> Potentially, support for these plugins would come from the original 
> plugin developer, but you've moved all their code to a non-standard 
> place (your theme directory) and wrapped it in is_function() calls. 
> Imagine the headache for a plugin developer who didn't know you did 
> this trying to figure out how their plugin is working on a site when 
> it's not installed in the plugins directory.


How can you get around having to pack the plugins with your theme unless 
you provide some sort of "is_function" wrapper or something to degrade 
gracefully?  If you want it to work out of the box, you have no option 
but to include the plugins, making sure that they will be overridden if 
the user already has them.