#12612 closed enhancement (duplicate)
Plugins dependancy
| Reported by: |
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Owned by: |
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| Milestone: | Priority: | normal | |
| Severity: | normal | Version: | 3.0 |
| Component: | Plugins | Keywords: | |
| Focuses: | Cc: |
Description
This feature already exists in Drupal and is very helpful.
When we enqueue a javascript, we can define another file that this script depends, and doing so Wordpress assures dependencies are fulfilled and dependant file is only linked when those files it depends are already present. That works great!
In the same way, a plugin could inform which plugins it depends from, and doing so, Wordpress would load those plugins first, and only then load the dependant plugin.
In plugins list (wp-admin/plugins.php), each plugin would have listed all plugins it requires to work, inform if they are available, and only be allowed to be activated when all dependances are filled (when all plugins it depends are activated). Otherwise, unavailable plugins would be highlighted and Activate link not provided.
Also, each plugin would have listed all plugins that depend on it, and while there is an active plugin depending on it, its Deactivate link is also not provided.
The benefit of this feature is that framework plugins could be safely developed. Today we have roles and capabilities, custom post types and custom taxonomy features, but we don't have UI pages for them, and there are plugins that implement UIs to manage these resources. In the same way, people would be able to develop plugins only with code to be used by other plugins, which would enhance that base plugin and depend on it. Or with simple UI that could be enhanced by other plugins.
Or, when we have a plugin we wanna enhance, instead of hacking it we just ask its author to add actions and filters, and we develop our own plugin to do what we want over the original one, and set that plugin as a dependance of ours.
Today this can be done, but we can't assure a plugin loads before another, which would break dependant plugin. And nothing stops a dependant plugin from being activated when its dependance is not available, or the base plugin be deactivated while dependant plugin remains activated.
This feature would solve all these issues and assure more "security" for people to develop plugins that relate to each other.
#11308