RFE: get_template_part() to return something or warn when nothing found

[sphakka]

AFAIK get_template_part() doesn't return anything. This is a nightmare when args are misspelled -- think of a leading/trailing space. Given that internally locate_template() does return what it finds, could we please either expose this return value or warn when nothing is found?

[johnbillion]

Thanks for the ticket, @sphakka.

You're right that get_template_part() doesn't return a value, but if it returned the value of locate_template() I'm not sure that this would tell you anything that you don't already know. If there's a typo in your file name then an empty string will be returned. If there's no typo but the file doesn't exist, it'll still return an empty string.

[sphakka]

The problem is that get_template_part( 'non-existing-file' ) fails silently. Of course page rendering would break, so you'd see that something is wrong, but that's not trivial without a message clue. The rationale is that something like

if ( ! get_template_part( 'I_misspelled_this_one' )
  error_log( 'I_misspelled_this_one: template file not found' );

would help spotting the mistake. It doesn't really need to report what it found (returning bool would be fine), but since locate_template() is the last statement in the code, then just having

return locate_template($templates, true, false);

would settle the matter with minimum effort ;-)

Actually, I now realize that this is an instance of a more general problem with many (all?) get_*() functions calling locate_template() at end. So, along the principle that silent failure is bad practice (unless I'm missing some obscure reason for not having the possibility of checking programmatically what goes on), a review of all those functions would be advised. That would also make them more consistent with other get_whatever() functions that already return something.