[wp-hackers] Some Left-Field names for Canonical Plugins

[Christopher O'Connell]

I think that part of the problem (and I am at least as guilty as anyone
else) is the fragmentation of the database. We have (and will soon have
better) custom post types, I think we need to try an encourage people to
work within this structure to store and manage their data.

>

You hit the nail on the head with those two examples!  I've struggled with
> both.  There's a definite need for a standard twitter infrastructure and
> repository for tweets, and a real need for a standard approach to events.
>  I've struggled with both of them, and still am. (As an aside, my Atlanta
> Startup Weekend team worked on a project called EventTank.com which, not
> ironically, is current built on WordPress.)
>
> Aren't calendar events pretty much just a custom "event" post type? IMHO,
we need to encourage people to work with the database that's already there,
rather than automatically going for creating a new DB. On the other hand,
it's not the easiest thing in the world to use: in particular, where do you
store things? The "meta" table seems the obvious place, but then what goes
into the actual post table? An empty post? A serialization of the data? All
the data jammed together?


> But seriously, what I'm hearing here is not the need for canonical plugins
> that expose some commonly needed UI but instead the need for optional
> baseline API functionality. In each of those three cases we don't really
> need elaborate UI functionality, we need shared infrastructure that plugins
> can build on.  Downloading tweets is easy, posting tweets is easy, storing
> tweets in a standard location is easy, and designing functions to load
> tweets from the database into arrays or objects is easy. OTOH there are a
> myriad of way to display tweets customized for the site owner and to make
> tweets in a UI optimized manner. Those latter features should be the realm
> of the plugin repository and the former should be in the form of
> standardized yet optional baseline plugins.
>

I really, really agree on the shared baseline. There will always be someone
who wants slightly different baseline functionality, but there's a lot of
lower level problems that are probably solved tens if not dozens of times.
If there were "canonical" libraries I would feel much more comfortable using
them.

Finally, I want to affirmatively vote against using the word "premium". In
general usage on the web, premium means "for money", and there are lots of
"premium" things in the WP community that are for money (and lots of premium
things outside of the WP community that are for money). Appropriating the
word premium won't make those things disappear, it will just confuse people.
I think it makes sense to chose a word that implies the quality, but still
free. Canonical or Core would be my votes.

~ Christopher