Monitoring the Code News that Helps Run WordPress
By Lorelle VanFossen, posted Jan 18 2010 at 12:00 pm | No Comments »
Recently, Alex King ran into issues with WordPress 2.9 compatibility with his popular Twitter Tools WordPress Plugin.
I recently put new releases of my Twitter Tools plugin – basically patches so that it would work in WordPress 2.9 on versions of PHP prior to 5.2. This is an interesting situation, where I hadn’t really done anything wrong in the plugin and the WP core team hadn’t really done anything wrong in the way they implemented their JSON functionality for versions of PHP prior to 5.2. It just happened that the bits of code weren’t compatible with each other.
While is it easy to blame WordPress for all the ills of compatibility and upgrading, sometimes the problems lie with the support code that runs WordPress. WordPress relies heavily upon PHP and MySQL, as well as JavaScript and its relatives like JQuery and AJAX.
King recommends:
Plugin/theme devs, be careful when including a compatibility library that might get added to WP core in the future. Try to structure your code in such a way that it will continue to work even if this happens.
WP core devs, when adding a library consider the plugins that might already be including that library and do so in a way that lets everything continue to work.
Here are some sources to add to your feed reader to keep you updated on changes, improvements, and issues with the code that supports WordPress.
- PHP Developer
- Planet PHP (aggregator)
- Hot Scripts Blog
- MySQL News and Events
- Planet MySQL (aggregator)
- Ajaxian
- jQuery