PlugIn Conflicts

Thoughts on "PlugIn Conflicts" are invited from respected developers.

I have some ideas on how this may be handled and am interested on other's contributions.

 

  • I was giving this some thought the other day, your solution would work, but it would need massive help from developers to ensure saftey.

    A lexical analyzer would be one way, however, that is a very inflexible solution for this type of task. Two plugins, by design, should be able to override any view and if necessary -- override the view they wish to extend, whether it's an Elgg default view or another plugin's view.  Case in point, the wall-to-wall plugin enhancement overridesthe messageboard.php to extend its functionality.

    The solution actually has to be *built-in* to the Elgg framework, to detect when something is
    "incorrect."

    Elgg sort of already has this built-in to help with package management through the manifest.xml file:

    <field key="recommends" value="package" />
    <field key="requires" value="another_package" />
    <field key="conflicts" value="different_package" />

    What we can do, is definitely provide some warning generation tools that can technically do what you're saying, but I think that it's going to be ultimately to the developer to make sure that there are no conflicts and/or issues. The use of plugin namespaces would also be an interesting enhancements.

    Let me know what your thoughts are.

    Mahmoud Abdelkader

  • You always come across unexpected conection in the labyrinth called Elgg. I plan to post here things that I chanced upon as a user.

    The latest is that Profile Manager (a very good plugin in itself) clashes with Groups, of all things. Recently I started seeeing two problems with Groups.

    (1) The description of the site missing. On the left you see the group Icon, on the right it's totally blank, except for the edit button.

    (2) When I try to create a new Group, in the form I don't see a box for description.

    I found that Profile Manager is the reason. When I disabled it everything came back. But it's rather a positional issue. I didn't want dispose Profile Manager. So there was a trial and end error series. I moved Profile Manager to the top, away from Goups and above the default profile. Now I have no problem with Groups.

     

  • Conflicts are found induced by:

    Siteaccess, Groupaccess, Profile Manager in 1.7.4., which I have are removed AND a Form is missing __token or __ts fields error when using the Invite members to groups.

    The remaining OK plugin sequence is:

    p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }h3 { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }

    groupmembers
    vazco_avatar
    vazco_forum
    groupemailer
    groupriver
    workshops
    geolocation
    small_world
    subscribe
    message_queue
    besucher
    logbrowser
    file_multigroup_upload
    event_calendar
    chat
    Default Chatrooms
    river_comments
    profile
    externalpages
    draggable_widgets
    publications
    pages
    tidypics
    dokuwiki
    bookmarks
    messages
    tasks
    tinymce
    online
    blog
    file
    zaudio
    thewire
    members
    reportedcontent
    categories
    defaultwidgets
    messageboard
    search
    upload_users
    bulk_invite
    invitefriends
    groups
    groupsfrommembers
    riverdashboard
    autosubscribegroup
    notifications
    notification_messages
    widgets_plus
    widgetlinks
    friends_of_friends
    wholeworldfriends
    clickablelinks
    elggdesign_pro_theme
    colleagues
    crontrigger
    htmlawed
    uncaptcha

    It should be build after the security-plugins in the buttom, theme & important layout plugins, registrations of users and groups and nice to have less important plugins in the top. But still a need to ban some plugins due to error in registration or in the resulting layout.