[wp-testers] Re: wp-testers Digest, Vol 37, Issue 159

[Spencer Lavery]

Andy Skelton wrote:

>  On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 10:40 AM, Spencer Lavery <phobea at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >  Themers/users should have complete control over formatting and
>  >  presentation, never needing to touch the php (except the hooks in the
>  >  themes, and loops if they so wish). Most of the WP templating system
>  >  allows this, but elements such a wp_list_cats don't. I assumed that
>  >  this was old code waiting to be revised, but to introduce new code
>  >  using this same, old method isn't where I thought WP was trying to go.
>
>  Beyond a certain level of customization, themers will always have to
>  touch PHP. There is no core intention to protect themers from the
>  scary, wonderful world of PHP. The added support for a theme's
>  functions.php shows that we mean to let themers have even more PHP
>  power.

Thanks for the reply Andy. Sorry I should have been clearer, when I
said without having to touch PHP, I meant the core files. I went off
on a bit of a tangent and didn't make a worthwhile point so just
ignore me sorry.

>  >  As an extra note - a way to cater for both up-to-date themers, and old
>  >  themes that don't have styles for the Gallery yet - would be to
>  >  introduce a gallery.php template file.
>
>  You propose support for a template to be used if post_content includes
>  a particular shortcode. This does not follow the logic of
>  template-loader.php. Themes can use the template_redirect hook to make
>  such decisions but this doesn't make sense for core. A post with a
>  gallery is still a post.

My very limited knowledge of PHP has come solely from theming WP so
please bear with me a bit as I don't understand the WP framework
fully.

A Post with a Gallery IS still a Post - but should it be? A Page is
treated differently from a Post, and I'm inclined to think that a
Gallery should be too. It isn't a blog post, after all, and could
probably benefit from being seperated completely from Posts in much
the same way as Alex Rabe has done with his NextGEN Gallery plugin.

This however would be a very big change, and isn't a bug-fix, so I'll
continue this discussion somewhere else (is there a list for
ideas/suggestions for future releases?) as this list should be for
bug-fixing now in order to get 2.5 released.

>  >  The ability to change a media file's permalink 'slug' would be
>  >  awesome. Currently it appears to use the meta data (EXIF?) from the
>  >  photo and not the 'title' that you input. If it worked off of the
>  >  'title' that would be an improvement, but being able to fully
>  >  customise it would be very handy.
>
>  Agreed.
>
>  Andy

Posted in Trac: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6437
I'll try and have a go at patching it but I'm not very awesome at PHP yet.