[wp-hackers] One CMS to Rule Them All (was This was painful to read...)

[Otto]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 1:21 PM, Mike Schinkel
<mikeschinkel at newclarity.net> wrote:
> BTW, it reminds me of the Army Corp of Engineers in North Georgia. It's run by a group of fishermen.  Their opinion of Lake Lanier is it is "a fishing lake" though it is far more popular for recreational use. Thus, even though the vast majority of users are recreational the Corp blocks every attempt to make the lake safer for recreation because the changes affect it's use as a fishing lake.  What they *could* do is make the 20% of the lake that is popular for recreation safer for recreation and leave the remaining 80% good for fishing, but they won't even consider that approach.

Yeah, well you know what? The fishermen are right. The recreational
users should just suck it up and go elsewhere. IMO, of course.

> My opinion is that they are not using custom post types yet because they are not yet available in the release version.  Wait a while and I believe that will change.  But it is my opinion so we can only wait to see if I am right or not.

So, you're basing your idea of the "most common use case" on what
"most people want" even though it has not been released yet, so they
can't actually *do* that at this point in time? LOL.

>> The most common case I've seen for plugins to use it is to create
>> their own subset of pages to display whatever. Like an image gallery,
>> for example. It takes over the /gallery/* set of pages, redirects to
>> itself, and does whatever it likes.
>
> Or, custom post types by another name...

No...As in redirecting to the plugin. You know, like what I *actually
said* instead of you pretending something else.

> Why must you be so condescending?  It's hard not to take things personal when you describe my writings in those terms.

If your writing was clearer, maybe I wouldn't have to use those terms.

> You would never do 20000 custom urls, you'd only do one custom url for all products.  But let's say you wanted to have a custom URL that lists recent products, and you want the "recent" slug to be used like the "acme-widgets" slug; you would add two custom URL templates:
>
> /products/recent/                               <-- this is more specific and would match first
> /products/{product_slug}/

I don't understand what you mean by {product_slug}. That's not any
form of URL matching scheme I've ever seen. It looks totally
nonstandard to me. What does {product_slug} match against? Any string?
With or without backslashes? Numeric? Alpha?

Your descriptions leave much to be desired, I can't decode them based
on nothingness.

If you meant that it's an arbitrary string, no backslash, then I gave
you just the way to do it earlier. With actual code instead of vague
descriptions.

> You are conflating the two. What's more what you propose is bad REST, HTTP and URL design.  You should issue a 404 error, not redirect to the general purpose.

Who are you to say what I should or should not do? What I did has
nothing to do with REST or HTTP, and that is in fact the way the
WordPress Template Hierarchy works. I suggest you look it up:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy

> The word "easy" and that code are oxymorons.

I find that code to be trivially easy, and I think that any human
being is capable of understanding it with a minimal amount of effort.

And I find your continued interjection of your opinion as if it was a
fact to be insulting.

> Ironic, you are treating your own opinions as truth handed down from up on high; why shouldn't I?

I'm providing actual code, actual examples, and actual explanations.
All you are providing is negative feedback, continued insults, and
unprovable untested opinions as facts.

> Better yet, maybe we are getting somewhere. How about we agree on this list that both of our opinions are just that, and not the final word on anything.  Deal?

I don't believe you're capable of sticking to such a deal at this
point. I have not one time treated my opinion as if it were a fact,
and I'm getting more and more annoyed at you for refusing to answer
any of my points with any commentary of substance

> It's foolish for you to say false here.  If the layer doesn't execute it doesn't make things slower.

If the layer doesn't execute, then it can't do anything and nothing
happens. Hey, maybe if I don't include files, then they won't slow
anything down either! I'm sorry, but this is a stupid argument. The
layer executing is the only case that matters.

> Adding a hook makes things slower. Does that stop the core team from adding new hooks each version?  Premature optimization is a fools errand.

I agree that premature optimization is a bad idea. However, I disagree
that NO optimization is the inverse of that idea.

Your layer will be slower than doing the same thing *without* the
layer. In other words, if I take all the code I gave before, rewrite
it slightly to be generic from function arguments, wrap it into a
function, then call the function... That is *slower*.

> That's answering out of context.  I'm asking how many people are doing URL rewriting where they had to write the code you are promoting?  Very few.

What? It would be all of them, because the code I'm giving you *is how
you do URL rewriting*.

And again, I don't understand you. Are you asking how many people add
URL rewriting to their own site by coding it themselves? I'd say
virtually none, but then again, how many people write their own theme?
The question makes no sense and seems somewhat pointless to begin
with.

> What I'd prefer to do is search the theme repo for it.  Again, plugins are not my use case, themes are.

I fail to understand why you keep pushing this to themes. It makes
little sense to me, as a theme would not be the primary use case for
URL rewriting in the first place. The end user is the one who wants to
change his URLs around. And he's probably going to look for plugins to
do it. Themes are visual only, generally speaking. Display candy.
Graphics and CSS. They're not the primary places to put code.

-Otto
Sent from Memphis, TN, United States