[wp-hackers] Custom Post Types and pending incompatibilities

[Stephen Rider]

On Jul 10, 2010, at 6:59 PM, Mike Schinkel wrote:

> If five people want to each build event plugins wouldn't be be great if they all settled on the same way to store the basic subset of information they all needed about events like naming of the custom fields for the date, venue, etc?  That way there would be a great likelihood of there being compatibility.

Not a bad idea, except for the whole "herding cats" element.  All you can really do is *encourage* certain behavior, and plugin devs will either do it or not.

A smart dev making a calendar plugin will throw in an API so that other plugins can interact and add functionality to it.  In turn the most flexible/powerful plugins will probably end up being the most popular.

(cue 1,000-post thread about plugin dependencies and sub-plugins!)

On Jul 12, 2010, at 7:39 AM, Michael Pretty wrote:

> As for future compatibility with core post types, I really hope that core doesn't ever add any more post types.  If anything, I'd prefer if posts and pages were no longer built in.  With custom post types and taxonomies, we have really opened up the types of web-apps for which WordPress can be the backbone.  Then posts and pages could be a core plugin automatically included in upgrades and installs.

I really like this idea.

Ideally, new post types will be in plugins only, and eventually Posts and Pages themselves should either move to Core Plugins or simply become optional.

On Jul 12, 2010, at 8:11 AM, Andrew Nacin wrote:

> They'll always be built in, but I'd like to see them become like any other
> post type (which includes the ability for another plugin to unregister them
> without the sky falling), and I imagine we'll be heading further in that
> direction in future releases. Same goes for tags and categories.

Welllll, Okay.  That works too.  I would prefer the former though.

And why no bundling of Core Plugins if they're as significant as, say "Posts and Pages post types"??)  So it hasn't been talked about.  Doesn't mean it shouldn't be talked about.  ;-)


On Jul 12, 2010, at 3:31 PM, Andrew Nacin wrote:

> just some additional food for
> thought:
> 
> I don't want my products/books/events to be wiped on an uninstall hook, as I
> worked hard to cultivate that data.


GREAT point.  We need to encourage plugin authors NOT to include the data itself in their plugins' uninstall routines.

A separate, explicit, "delete custom data" function, maybe -- but it should be impossible to trigger accidentally....


Stephen