Tools That Can Be Used in Building

[discobot]

I mentioned this in a reply to another person’s post. To bring it to the surface more, I am reposting and elaborating on my thought.

I always have and notice that I continue to prefer “The Drupal Way” of providing high-level tools (modules) that can be used to build extensible and scalable sites rather than being provided solutions in the form of plug-ins. That approach reduces the plethora of plugins that must be maintained in the WP environ, while enabling the building of anything one can imagine – without WIXing it.

While devs find this approach attractive, the Drupal weakness has long been a ui that pushes non-techy clients of devs away from the table. Additionally, Drupal’s update process can be simply annoying. Add to that, it’s weakness in the ecommerce area.

Imagine bringing the great features of WordPress and the great features of Drupal together. The result would be innovative, a unique position in the CMS arena, and simply amazing.

Think about it? Consider it?

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Read-only archive: Issues · ClassicPress/ClassicPress · GitHub

Author: Sunshiney

Vote count: 5

Status: open

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Comments

I worked with Drupal for in 2008 and 2009 before switching to do full time development with WordPress. I have had the same mindset as mentioned here for years, I even debated it on the old wp-hackers mailing list in 2010.

Since that went nowhere, I developed at library for WordPress that primarily supports the concepts of modules and that is much more opinionated that WordPress is with plugins to ensure more consistency with implementation.

So IMO, modules are definitely a way forward. Similar to plugins since they are extensions, but also similar to libraries because I think they best when adding a new internal PHP API (not to be confused with a REST API.) #fwiw

~ posted by Mike Schinkel

Is a “module” just a plugin that provides developer-facing APIs rather than user-facing features with a graphical interface?

If so, this is basically what we are planning.

See a couple of examples here on this site:

• Issues · ClassicPress/ClassicPress · GitHub
• Issues · ClassicPress/ClassicPress · GitHub

~ posted by James Nylen

@nylen

"Is a “module” just a plugin that provides developer-facing APIs "

From my perspective, yes.

~ posted by Mike Schinkel

For the most part, yes. Example:

"Ctools is a module that provides various functionality for developers who wish to use it. Think of it as a toolkit of functionality that you can use to save time in developing some regularly used functionality. Includes:

Plugins – tools to make it easy for modules to let other modules implement plugins from .inc files.
Exportables – tools to make it easier for modules to have objects that live in database or live in code, such as ‘default views’.
AJAX responder – tools to make it easier for the server to handle AJAX requests and tell the client what to do with them.
Form tools – tools to make it easier for forms to deal with AJAX.
Object caching – tool to make it easier to edit an object across multiple page requests and cache the editing work.
Contexts – the notion of wrapping objects in a unified wrapper and providing an API to create and accept these contexts as input.
Modal dialog – tool to make it simple to put a form in a modal dialog.
Dependent – a simple form widget to make form items appear and disappear based upon the selections in another item.
Content – pluggable content types used as panes in Panels and other modules like Dashboard.
Form wizard – an API to make multi-step forms much easier.
CSS tools – tools to cache and sanitize CSS easily to make user-input CSS safe."

Much of Ctools was incorporated into core at Drupal 8.

I got my CMS start in Drupal and the result was that I did not have a need to master Javascript, let alone React. The modules enabled me to skip that aspect and instead zero in on using the hammers, screwdrivers and other tools provided by the modules. I kinda freaked when a client demanded I use WP and looked at that environment. Thousands of plugins zeroing in on a few tasks when if I had a hammer, I could do a huge group of them.

But, that did lead me to learning more and more Javascript. I still prefer tools though as my time is a nonrenewable resource.

~ posted by Sunshiney

[viktor]

Any interest in this? This sounds more like packages, which CP already includes for various functionality. Like PHPMailer, SimplePie, etc.

[james]

This is too large and vague to be actionable, but I still think other petitions like object relationships are heading in the same direction. Closing this in favor of making individual petitions for other, specific “tools”.

[anon66243189]

IMO, if we provide plugins that only ship “dev” oriented Apis without user interface, the only users who will ever potentially use this, will not be users in the common sense but devs.

In that case however, we can also think about permitting things we have until now dismissed because “dangerous for the users”.

So I don’t get the “core idea”.
Why do we want to ship plugins that are focusing solely on dev api, and leave the user behind by not providing a GUI, if we same time try to kill every request that somehow might endanger a “common” user?
A dev knows well what he does, or supposedly does.
So forbidding SVG upload, or a rename of files, because the users will do messes and get their sites in danger (which makes total sense), but then provide things that are dev focused and do not come with an UI (which is really the only thing differentiating this sort of CMS from a PHP implementation with database), … is weird, I think.

Out of 10 or 100 or 1000 users, how many can actually write PHP or deal with APIs?
And why do folks use a CMS that has a GUI?
IMO, Because either one can’t write code or because one wants to save time.
So a plugin with just API but no GUI is… useful, but not really (not for most).

So for one I agree that the petition is not focused and does not really let you act on anything anyway, but on the other hand I also don’t think that this should be our main focus.
The GUI is what makes these CMS useful, along with the APIs which are necessary to even have a GUI. But without GUI, WordPress would not have 50 million websites done with it. And Without GUI, I think the current CMS is actually too limiting, because a dev will just use a framework that does not lock him into the limitations of a GUI. Is it not too late to make the CMS a “less GUI more Dev” oriented thing?

The whole idea of this is to allow anyone possibly to manage his/her site. Am I wrong with this?
So for me if anyone wants to provide a plugin with just code, be my guest (I do the same when I do not have time to actually provide settings and GUI interface)
But that should not be the standard in CP, I think?

[timkaye]

I agree completely. If it has no UI, it should almost always be a plugin. (There are some exceptions, such as things to go in the wp-config.php file, but not many.)