[wp-hackers] Improving Plugin (and Theme) metadata

[Peter Westwood]

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Some design improvements below after sleeping on the idea.

Peter Westwood wrote:
| Some goals for the implementation:
|
| 1. Provide the ability for plugin/theme meta data to be translated.
| 2. Seperate the meta-data from the rest of the plugin/theme.
| 3. Combine the parsing code used for plugins and themes.
| 4. Allow for extensible metadata.
|
| Requirements:
|
| 1. Use gettext so as to integrate with the rest of a plugins translation.
| 2. Protect against malformed plugins breaking the admin with PHP errors.
|
| Possible Solution:
|
| 1. Plugins have to be stored within a folder under PLUGINDIR.
| 2. All plugins have a metadata.php file.
| 3. metadata.php file is included by the admin plugin page (not in global
| scope to keep it clean) as a way of discovering the available plugins.
|

Rather than a metadata.php file we move back to single file plugins.

When we are discovering plugins we define('WP_PLUGIN_DISCOVER',true);
the simple plugin file my_plugin.php which is in the root PLUGINDIR becomes:

<?php

load_plugin_textdomain();

register_plugin( __FILE__,
~                 __('Description'),
~                 __('Plugin Name'),
~                'http://example.com',
~                'Joe Bloggs',
~                 'http://joe.bloggs.name'),);

if ( !(defined('WP_PLUGIN_DISCOVER') )
{
	//All plugin code goes here including includes.
}

//The End
?>

You can still use a folder and a metadata.php if you want.

westi
- --
Peter Westwood
http://blog.ftwr.co.uk | http://westi.wordpress.com
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