[wp-hackers] Facebook API and WordPress Plugin Development - Insight / Best Practice

[Ryan McCue]

Mike Schinkel wrote:
> Specifically let's say I build a plugin for distribution via wordpress.org and I decide to include Mark's library. Also Jeffrey Nolte builds a plugin and uses Mark's library too.  All is still good because Mark's library checks class_exists() before creating the class.
> 
> However, Mark has 3 pull requests and from reading those pull requests is seems like they have features that in some cases might be requirements for use. And those pull requests also modify the API. 

If they modify the API, they're breaking compatibility, simple as that.

This is one of the things we discussed at #wpcs (which is where that
ticket was born), and there's no good way to handle it. The best we can
do is say "a requires b version >= 0.2", and the plugins have to handle
API backwards compatibility.

Namespaces would help, but would still be a pretty crappy way of
handling it.

-- 
Ryan McCue
<http://ryanmccue.info/>