I spent some time today working on a WordPress implementation for a political candidate. It’s basically a vanilla WP install fit inside their existing shell, with a few of my hacks: WP Last Visit, WP Photos, WP Unformatted and my unreleased home page caching hack.

This was my first extended experience with WordPress 1.2 (I’ve been busy on another project) and I ended up re-writing much of my WP Photos hack to make it fairly 1.2 plugin compatible.

One thing I don’t get about the WP 1.2 plugins, they all generally give you new functionality that you expose by adding tags, etc. into the template. If someone then disables the plugin without removing those tags, their blog will break. The plugin enabling/disabling mechanism is nice and interactive (and it makes people feel good), but I think it gives them the false impression that they can control more than they actually can by simply clicking things on and off on the plugins page.

Also, why isn’t there an ‘Enabled’ checkbox column instead of the Enable/Disable link? The click-click-click to make changes isn’t too bad, but a single click to apply all changes would be nicer. I wonder how the rest of the dev team would feel about doing it that way.

Back on topic, it was fun doing the implementation and revisiting some code I haven’t looked at in a while. Also, I should have a 1.2 compatible version of WP Photos released later this week.