Wedge

On the other hand, I suspect they might not. It means less reliability over what features will be available, however with the plugin system able to recognise hooks available in other plugins, that's not insurmountable.

There is a central place where plugins are enabled/disabled - it's Admin > Plugins. But bundled plugins would appear there in the same way as any other plugins, which is where my usability problem occurs - though redirection on install might not be a bad idea.

OOoooh, I got an idea. I could put a notification in the main menu under the Admin menu (where the plugins menu option is) to hint there's something interesting there...

And yeah, I understand your enthusiasm for making things modular, and to a degree I share it, I'm just very strongly wary of making things harder for users to fathom where to go to do things.

I love the idea of things being plug-ins. I remove PM's from most sites I admin (abuse issues) so being able to disable it is key (permissions work.)

That said, if more "things" become plug-ins but are there by default you basically have Core plug-ins and plug-ins. Most systems that go so modular end up calling them modules.

Well, I've killed the spell checker entirely after I realized that it doesn't really work well enough with any language other than English.

Can't really see how it can be missed when the majority of users have a spell checker in the browser anyway.

Works well with French I reckon.
Still surprised you're so active when you're alone on that project. How do you do that. No moral support!
You should be working on Wedge at some point. If you can adapt to the smf coding guidelines it'd be a perfect fit. More exposure for your code. Especially given how you've been progressively dropping smf compatibility (don't tell me your new hooks are interoperable with smf. ;))
I saw you removed the backup system too this weekend, just as Pete did ;) really, isnt it annoying for you to reinvent the wheel, knowing that in addition you'll have to support your fork by yourself?

That's one of the problems I have with it, I guess.It's mostly down to how good the pspell implementation is. For the absolutely common/widely used languages (English, French, Spanish) it's not too bad. For anything else, it's problematic.


While I've been thinking about it being a plugin, there is firmly a part of me that is debating just ripping it out and dropping it entirely, especially as pspell is not so commonly installed any more (and is pushed down in favour of enchant), or maybe I should just investigate writing a new one with enchant as a plugin to make sure support is there for it.

Re: plugins and the admin area, WP handles this question quite well (IMO). Your plugins appear in the plugins page (where you add new ones, disable/delete old ones, etc), then to modify settings they add their own submenu to the admin menu structure, or they add a single link inside an existing common submenu item (in WP-Admin>Tools, usually), or at a minimum they have a settings link in the plugins page.

Something akin would be good; either the plugin makes a "submenu" in the admin page (big plugins would benefit from this, WD for instance) or they add a single settings link to a common submenu.

Re: spelling, don't think we have it enabled. TBH I'd rather spelling was offloaded to a plugin; more opportunity for better solutions that way.

As you can tell from my 'thought' none of my lot use spell check either.

As Arantor pointed out - its not even English!

 :lol:

Um, yes... I already accounted for all of this.

There's no enforcement of plugins having their settings anywhere. Some plugins don't have settings pages if they don't need them, which is cool.

Some plugins need only a single option or a few options as part of a page, some need massive areas. By not putting any rules in place (and thus no programming interface for it), plugins are free to create what they need and nothing more or less than that.

Plugins can, optionally, declare what URL should be used for settings, so that there is a settings link in the main plugin listing. (The very earliest screenshots of the plugin manager, even when it was called the add-on manager, actually showed this!)

Assuming authors do their job properly - and they should, because it makes their life easier - it's consistent and approachable.

The problem is bundled plugins, and WP has this exact problem. It has two plugins bundled with it but unless you knew they were there from past experience, or actually went into the plugins area, you'd never know they were even bundled with it.

Which means if we added big ticket features as part of the base package, you'd still never know they were there unless either we redirected you there after installation, or made it more prominent by auto pushing items to the main admin page even when the plugins weren't installed... either way that means writing special rules and special logic just for those cases.

(Added a poll about the spellchecker. Better than a long conversation I'd say...)

:edit: given the nature of the question, I don't think we should consider removing the spell-checker even if the 'no' has a minority, say 20%. Although 5% is a given :P

wooooaaaahhh.... stop the train.....Thats against the 'poll rules'!!
You cannot say 'even if you vote against it - you're going to get it anyway.
Oh.... yes you can I suppose.  :lol:

Our house, our rules, as it were.

It's just that if a feature is vital to a minority, and it doesn't bother anyone else because it's disabled by default, it shouldn't be removed for the sake of removing it.
However, given that all participants to this topic said they weren't using it, I suspect we'll have a large majority in favor of removing it.

So do I, but if there are people very enthusiastic about it being present, I'm sure we can do something to accommodate them. It might be making it a plugin, it might be something else, but we'll sort something out, I'm sure.

Arrrgghhh!

Please 'unvote' me! (finger trouble)

I can't be arsed either way about a spell checker. As has been mentioned, decent browsers do it anyway.  :whistle: