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If WooCommerce gets it's own Exchange, would that pretty much seal the coffin for eventually allowing plugin related questions here? The proposal is almost at a tipping point where one more flood of users could get it to the Commit Stage then eventually Beta.
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@PieterGoosen I was looking over a question about shortcodes and you mentioned "Output buffering should always be your last go-to option, not your first." - Why is that? ( wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/192393/… )
From my understand output buffering is relatively fast...
No, you don’t need output buffering in this case. As a rule of thumb: Don’t use output buffering unless you really have to.
Just imagine what happens if someone else uses output buffering too from a plugin and it crosses with yours:
// plugin
ob_start();
// later, you in your theme
ob_start();...
Plus, OB can "eat" your errors: errors happening between ob_start() and ob_get_clean() are not always accessible. This is really hard to debug.
That makes sense, I've never run into those kind of issues but I could see why it would be hard to debug. I feel as if the plugin example would be a rarity though.
I just had that a few days ago with code from @gmazzap. :) I've passed a string to a method, and his code assumed it was an an array. Then it tried to run foreach on that value in an output buffer. I got no error, no exception, no return value, just void.
It just seems so messy ( at least to me ), I try to split my PHP / HTML respectively as much as I can and when I found output buffering it made it sooo much easier.
Yeah templates would definitely make separating the two easier, I've never really done templates for shortcodes but I've seen that in plugins that have a bunch of them. While I have you here, what's your opinion on the WooCommerce Proposal? My comment
On one hand I want to get behind it and nudge it into Commit but on the other I think it's weird for a WordPress plugin to have it's own Exchange.
I don't expect the Woocommerce site to get enough momentum to get out of beta. We should just allow plugin related questions. Close questions based on their quality, answer those which are written well.
I didn't think so either but the spikes of when Matt linked it then the other when WPTavern linked it gave me hope. On that note what defines what's good quality question though, where would you draw the line, i.e. Functionality ( code )? Basic usage of the plugin via admin panel?
You need also a good answer rate, and that's where I expect to see that site failing. Do you really think the questions will better over there? Probably not.
If that's the case then wouldn't allowing woocommerce questions also degrade the answer rate here? It's the same issue with the same solution. IF people are interested they'll contribute to it.
It's difficult to judge that without seeing it operational IMO
I did that once for summer cleanup, tried to go back and close a bunch of plugin questions. I think I overdid it though cause I was told to stop lol. 100 close votes a day was probably too much.
That was probably long overdue then cause I don't think it was even that long ago, a year or a bit more.
Well, I don't mind having plugins on-topic for WPSE, is there anything I can do to push that idea along? If plugins will eventually come back on-topic here I won't pursue the Woo proposal.
Think
We as community (that includes you, the reader) have the stance that 3rd party/non-core plugin and theme specific questions are off topic on our site. That rule excludes three parts: Plugins and Themes shipped with core (the Twenty* series) and "future core" or "feature" plugins.
What I n...
I suggested in one of the meta posts about maybe having a global chat regarding the policy but I wasn't going to make a solid topic about it if the mods were against the idea cause it could be just as chaotic as it is civil
No, you don’t need output buffering in this case. As a rule of thumb: Don’t use output buffering unless you really have to.
Just imagine what happens if someone else uses output buffering too from a plugin and it crosses with yours:
// plugin
ob_start();
// later, you in your theme
ob_start();...
