[wp-hackers] Is WP_INSTALLING constant here to stay?

[Mike Schinkel]

> Well, like I said earlier, there is a difference between custom
> one-off's and things that you intend to release to the public.

What we built was custom, but it would be useful as a general purpose plugin and I would love to eventually make it one.

> presumably you're talking about a slowness involved between the time that
> the text is entered and the time that the HTTP hit returns your data from
> the AJAX request.

That's exactly the problem.  Without SHORTINIT we couldn't get it fast enough for the user to find the latency acceptable. And we agreed it was otherwise too slow.

> but other ways might exist to solve that as well,
> depending on circumstances.

I'd love to see them. I'm the last one who would say I know there are not better ways to do something but we (5 people) could not come up with a viable alternate solution. 

> Pre-loading possible search results, for example, to give a limited dropdown with
> additional ones loading in the background, maybe.

We looked at that; it didn't fit expected behavior and any other type of caching was impractical because we have no idea what the user might type.  If we had a much large development budget we might have been able to hire a search specialist to build client side code with an advance prediction algorithm but that was just beyond any reasonable scope.

> Hard to say without specifics, but generally
> there are ways of rethinking the problem.

This was a hard problem, I don't think easy solutions exist. If they do I'd love to hear them.  

-Mike



On Jan 22, 2013, at 10:41 PM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 7:20 PM, Mike Schinkel <mike at newclarity.net> wrote:
>> So how would you in a plugin set SHORTINIT
> 
> Obviously, you can't. SHORTINIT doesn't load plugins at all.
> 
>> we ran into latency issues that the person developing it said he could only resolve the latency issues by directly loading a PHP file via AJAX and setting the SHORTINIT constant to true before including wp-load.php.
> 
> Well, like I said earlier, there is a difference between custom
> one-off's and things that you intend to release to the public. Without
> more specific details about the situation, it's hard to state what an
> alternative method might be. A "predictive search drop-down" can be
> done in a lot of different ways, but presumably you're talking about a
> slowness involved between the time that the text is entered and the
> time that the HTTP hit returns your data from the AJAX request. That
> is indeed a problem, but other ways might exist to solve that as well,
> depending on circumstances. Pre-loading possible search results, for
> example, to give a limited dropdown with additional ones loading in
> the background, maybe. Hard to say without specifics, but generally
> there are ways of rethinking the problem.
> 
> But again, if it's a custom job for a specific case, then sure,
> loading wp-load directly can be fine. In a custom case, where you
> control everything, you don't have to code generically.
> 
> -Otto
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