[wp-hackers] Access files inside a plugin directory?

[Dougal Campbell]

On Mar 23 2010 10:18 AM, Jeremy Clarke wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 7:38 PM, scribu<scribu at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> URL: plugins_url('file_name', __FILE__);
>>
>> PATH: dirname(__FILE__) . '/file_name';
>>      
> Is using __FILE__ an accepted practice in WP-land? I have many
> installs where I use symlinks ( ln -s ) to share plugin/theme
> directories between multiple installations, and any use of __file__
> completely screws up file includes in that setup. Most plugins manage
> to avoid it but the ones that use it need to be modified by hand.
>
> Isn't it presumptive or something? Seems dangerous to have as a best practice.
>    

Well, it presumes that you won't be doing something way-out-of-the-norm, 
like symlinking stuff between multiple installs ;)

That said, yeah, using __FILE__ is definitely a pretty common practice. 
I suppose we really should all be using something more like:

   // Get just the parent directory name of the current file. Path is 
stripped away.
   $my_plugin_dir_slug = '/' . basename( dirname( __FILE__ ) );
   $my_plugin_dir = WP_PLUGIN_DIR . $my_plugin_dir_slug;
   $my_plugin_url = WP_PLUGIN_URL . $my_plugin_dir_slug;

-- 
Dougal Campbell <dougal at gunters.org>
http://dougal.gunters.org/
http://twitter.com/dougal
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