[wp-hackers] Sharing codebase between plugins

[Guus (IFS)]

Thanks for your comments. I agree with you as I indeed experienced the 
problems you describe with different versions, but over the years I have 
developed e.g. a 'mini library' with some stuff that is very basic and 
doesn't really change, so that's why I use that trick. So yes, you need to 
know when, why and how to do this.

Related to performance I don't think Wordpress is that efficient in general, 
although I don't know the core code. With just skipping the code in the 
second file with the define or just including another file after the check 
shouldn't take much processing time.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Nikola Nikolov
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2014 9:56 PM
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Sharing codebase between plugins

I see,

I have a couple of concerns with such an approach though:

#1 Size - the core plugin is actually going to consist of multiple
directories, scripts, images, etc. so it's not really efficient to have it
included in each and every one of the extra plugins.
#2 Updates - using your approach is difficult to use a specific version of
the library. Say the user updates one of your plugins, but not the rest.
Then you might use the latest version of the library, or an old version of
the library(in which case, you might get fatal errors, due to undefined
functions, etc.)

Thanks for sharing though,
Nikola


On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Guus (IFS) <guus at inspiration-for-success.com
> wrote:

> I am using a library file with some useful stuff in multiple plugins and
> just set a constant to check if the code is already included.
>
> <?php // start of library file
> if (!defined('_MY_LIBRARY_FILE_INCLUDED')) {
>    #define('_MY_LIBRARY_FILE_INCLUDED',true);
>    libraryFunction1() {
>        // code
>    }
>    libraryFunction2() {
>        // code
>    }
> }
> // end of library file
> ?>
>
> -----Original Message----- From: Nikola Nikolov
> Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2014 5:27 AM
> To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
> Subject: [wp-hackers] Sharing codebase between plugins
>
>
> What do you do when you want to avoid code duplication by sharing the same
> code base between multiple plugins?
>
> Here's the situation that I'm in:
>
> I have a plugin that adds some custom post types and functionality. 
> Another
> plugin that uses similar functionality is going to be developed. Possibly
> in the future more plugins that use those post types will also be created.
>
> So the idea is to separate out a "core" plugin that will allow any of the
> plugins to function both on their own and combined, without having to ship
> the code with each one(well - probably we'll need at least an archive of
> the core plugin).
>
> Now my question is how to handle that dependency(note that my client would
> prefer if the core plugin is not listed on the plugins page - not sure if
> that's really possible).
>
> Right now I've thought about the following solutions:
> - Have each of the plugins contain a .zip archive with the core plugin.
> Then perhaps use https://github.com/thomasgriffin/TGM-Plugin-Activation in
> order to define the dependency in each plugin. I'm just not sure how it
> would handle updates - so when the user updates a sub-plugin it should
> update the core plugin if the sub-plugin is bundled with an updated 
> version
> - Copy the core plugin as a mu-plugin if it's not already there. Again not
> sure how to handle updates. Also when should I copy the plugin files - 
> what
> if FTP credentials are required?
>
> I think my main concern are updates.
>
> For instance how to make sure that I'm using the correct core base? What 
> if
> the user updates one of the sub-plugins and that updates the core plugin,
> but they don't update the rest of the sub-plugins? Ideally I should have
> things compatible between versions, but what if I have to introduce a
> change that is not compatible?
>
> I also looked at the Plugin Dependencies plugin (
> https://wordpress.org/plugins/plugin-dependencies/ ), but I don't really
> want to add another plugin to the bundle.
>
> Thanks,
> Nikola
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