A few weeks ago I was testing some plugins and realized it was about time I write an update to Stephen Rider’s Log Deprecated Calls plugin. I don’t like reinventing the wheel, but there were a few reasons I wanted to start anew.
I spent quite a bit of time early in the WordPress 3.0 development cycle improving our deprecated notices. We added reporting of deprecated arguments and I tediously went back through the SVN history to find the version numbers for every deprecated function, both when the function was introduced and when it was deprecated. We also formally deprecated a number of functions, such as the really old widget API — e.g. use wp_register_sidebar_widget(), not register_sidebar_widget() — and the old escaping aliases — e.g. use esc_attr() instead of attribute_escape().
So, I wanted to make sure there was a plugin to fully leverage all of this. Stephen indicated he wanted to update his plugin to handle arguments (originally released for WordPress 2.6), but that he was also working on integrating it into his own plugin framework. I wanted to scrap the extra table and leverage a custom post type for both the storage and the UI, and see how far that would get me.
The results were interesting. I’ve made some pretty interesting customizations to allow me to leverage the custom post type UI, and the plugin is scattered with notes on possible enhancements for WordPress 3.1 that can help a lot of plugin developers, which I’ll revisit when we start development in September. In hindsight I think leveraging the UI was a wildly successful experiment, even with the hacks I employed to make it work to my liking, because I didn’t have to worry about any overhead.
Feedback and bug reports are encouraged. The plugin is available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Here’s the source. The current version is 0.1-RC1.
