Member
Child themes were a great idea because it lets people customize a theme without either losing their changing when upgrading, or losing the ability to upgrade.
The same problem exists with plugins, so why not let them be extended and overwritten in the same way?
Member
if a plugin developer is thorough in their development process, then they will include hooks and filters, to allow for extensibility and customization. your idea is good, but there's no real effective way for wordpress (as an organization) to establish some sort of regulation per this.
Member
"if a plugin developer is thorough in their development process, then they will include hooks and filters, to allow for extensibility and customization."
Right, but how many actually do that? 10 percent?
"there's no real effective way for wordpress (as an organization) to establish some sort of regulation per this."
I'm not proposing a regulation, I'm proposing a technical solution, just like with child themes. Child plugins could be activated before parent plugins, and WordPress could parse out functions from the parent plugin if an overriding function existed in the child plugin.
Member
I think the idea is sound. I've encountered a couple use-cases for this. I suppose this would be the way to go unless there's a way to create a php equivalent to the very handy "custom.css" that themes come with.
I don't get the "regulation" counter argument.
Inactive
Lead Plugin Wrangler
In a way this already exists. The problem is each 'parent' plugin has different dependencies, so it's on the child-plugin author to make sure they call the right parent AND the right parent VERSION. Many times, major releases can cause dependent plugins to break (see BuddyPress) so the best thing to do would be to check 'does plugin foo exist? Is it active? Okay!'
And that can already be done.
Member
One wierdly useful idea is a virtual mod http://code.google.com/p/vqmod/
Member
I agree for the use of some sort of child plugin. Woothemes has implemented something similar for their woocommerce plugin. You copy files from /wp-content/plugins/woocommerce to /wp-content/themes/yourthemes/woocommerce and WP automatically uses the files in the theme folder rather than the plugin folder. This way users can make customizations to their plugins without losing them to a plugin update.
Member
There are existing plugins that automatically redirect the parent page to its first currently-published child page. The plugin respects the Menu Order that you give the child pages too.
Inactive
I would like to do this. I just switched my forms over to the JetPack form short code plugin. But to make it fit in with the rest of my theme I can't do it with only access to the plugins CSS which isn't all-inclusive anyway. Looks real ugly; as seen here:
http://www.burragallery.com/gallery-emails/email-brook-gerard
The email form should look more like the comment field bellow it. the comments are only active on that page for this purpose.
Cheers,.
P.S. I have a topic for my issue here:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/altering-a-jetpack-module-without-modifying-it?
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