Extending core tables in plugins

judgej

Many (if not most) modules in Vanilla 1 messed around with the core tables, often adding columns here and there where they were needed. Vanilla 2 plugins don't seem to do that. Is that a new coding standard for Vanilla, or frowned upon, or just something I have not yet encountered?

Adding metadata to users is easy now due to the helper classes that manage all that. How about discussions and comments? If I want to add a few flags to the comments for use in my plugin, is the standard here to create a new table and add the properties to that, linking by comment and discussion IDs?

judgej

Just on the subject of user data, users have settings in the user table (a serialized array - fast but nasty to handle outside of PHP) and there is a separate metadata table. Do they both service essentially the same purpose, or is there a subtle difference?

Tim

We made UserMeta to help plugin devs handle user data in a clean way. Gdn_Plugin contains methods that handle this for you.

As for extending core tables, IPTracking plugin does this:
$Structure = Gdn::Structure(); $Structure ->Table('User') ->Column('LastIP', 'varchar(14)', TRUE) ->Set(FALSE, FALSE);

"Add a column called LastIP to the User (GDN_User) table as a varchar(14) which CAN be NULL".

judgej

Thanks. It still does not feel right extending a core table for a plugin, but it doesn't half make querying, setting and sorting that data easier that using additional tables (which, often being 1:1 relationships, also does not feel right).

Tim

Choose the way you like to work