GSoC 2014: Plugin Dependencies and possibly Asset Pipeline

[Atanas Penchev]

Hello!

I am interested in writing a Plugin Dependency Manager solution for
WordPress. However, I was wondering if that manager is supposed to look for
other plugins as requirements or only for assets?

If it is the first case, every plugin developer will have to follow a
specification. Furthermore, as the minimum requirements for WordPress are
below PHP 5.3, we cannot use PHP namespaces for plugins which makes the
task more complex. Even so, if a healthy plugin dependency manager is
developed, I believe the WordPress ecosystem will become more solid.

However, if we are only interested in assets loading, we could look into
somehow implementing Bower or a similar custom solution (maybe in
conjunction with with Grunt, which WordPress is already using). In that
case, the plugins dependency project overlaps with the Asses Pipeline
project and I will be happy working on them.

What are you thoughts and advices? Any help would be appreciated.

With kind regards,
Atanas Penchev.

[Josh Pollock]

Atanas-

I don't know what the spec is supposed to be, but had a few thoughts on
this.

I would suggest you search Otto's site for the article he wrote on handling
plugin dependencies in themes. The code in there would be a good place to
start, or at least study, as it doesn't require anything besides plugins
having a valid header.


Also, have you seen http://wpackagist.org/ ? It could allow a dependency
manager to use composer without having to require plugin developers to
manually add composer support, which isn't feasible.

Take care,
Josh

Post by Atanas Penchev
Hello!
I am interested in writing a Plugin Dependency Manager solution for
WordPress. However, I was wondering if that manager is supposed to look for
other plugins as requirements or only for assets?
If it is the first case, every plugin developer will have to follow a
specification. Furthermore, as the minimum requirements for WordPress are
below PHP 5.3, we cannot use PHP namespaces for plugins which makes the
task more complex. Even so, if a healthy plugin dependency manager is
developed, I believe the WordPress ecosystem will become more solid.
However, if we are only interested in assets loading, we could look into
somehow implementing Bower or a similar custom solution (maybe in
conjunction with with Grunt, which WordPress is already using). In that
case, the plugins dependency project overlaps with the Asses Pipeline
project and I will be happy working on them.
What are you thoughts and advices? Any help would be appreciated.
With kind regards,
Atanas Penchev.
_______________________________________________
wp-hackers mailing list
http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-hackers