[wp-hackers] Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your wordpress life a little easier...

[Marcus Pope]

> Thank you for the invitation, you honour me, but I have no time nor interest in debating in support of the status quo that I
> happen to agree with.
> But I'll leave you with this thought: we, hackers and developers on this mailing list, are a tiny, tiny, minority of WordPress
> users. And WordPress is a user's tool first and foremost. I agree with that and it should not change.
> It doesn't matter if something that we developers have to do to move a site to live, or to publish a new version of a site for
> client approval, is awkward, or takes more steps than would be ideal, or even is prone to errors; the guiding light for core
> functionality in WordPress is the users and the user experience.
> I whole-heartedly support that. So anything that makes it harder for users; whether another choice to make, another
> configuration option, or a more cpu-expensive operation is more than likely to be considered a bad move.
> Mike

I totally understand Mike.  It's a shame though because I think through discourse we could find out which option really adds overhead to the system.  And really I was hoping to find out more about what makes it harder for the users when root-relative urls are in use.  I have heard regular users complain about this core aspect, not just us developers which is why I wrote the plugin.  Ultimately I'll be left with writing up a synopsis of how I see your side's perspective versus getting the information directly from the source.  And there are not many out there who are as familiar with the codebase and supportive of absolute urls that are also willing to discuss it as thoroughly as you have.  Maybe a little compensation for your time would be in order for such input, or perhaps not even a debate, but a flushed-out, one-page-perspective on the topic.

I agree that as developers we should take extra steps to make the end-user's life easier.  I agree that if that process were complex but the end-user's life were easier it would be worth it.  I just don't know how root-relative urls make the end-user's life more difficult and that was the information I was seeking from your side of the table.  Maybe you'll come around one day in some spare time, maybe not.  I have transferred all of the points that I found in this thread and others over to the Google group, and will continue to search for other reasons you and others have provided for such a design decision.  I appreciate the effort you have put into the discussion thus far.

@Dagan Henderson - yeah I'm sorry to see it continue here, though I'd say it's far less raging that it was on Friday :D  To answer your question as concisely as possible, this problem is not solvable via a plugin for multi-site and the overhead it adds to vanilla installs is significant as a plugin because the URLs get transformed twice, sometimes three times over instead of zero times that could be possible with a core architecture shift.  I'm working with the core committers to add filters to make the multi-site option feasible, but imo it's a step in the wrong direction.  I'm still in search of what harm the step in the other direction would be.

Thanks again everyone!