Modernize the Codebase – A Plea from a WordPress Plugin Author

My fate in that regard is sealed. I cannot.
However, that response simply helps my argument. How many developers will simply throw up their hands and walk away? Why do you encourage this? How can the maintainers not see the horrifics they put any plugin author(and themselves) through? WP succeeds here by free access and pretty UI alone.

Keep in mind, we will want to keep backwards compatibility.

This would moot the point. I agree in minor point versions, yes. But a major rewrite is needed, or this legacy codebase will eventually drown in it’s own maintenance. This will indeed have to break compatibility with previous major revisions.
Upgrading the database, surely, but the code? You have a jumbled mess of global functions NOW that exist for no more than proxy, and are more often than not buggy.
I would far rather have a fatal error tell me xyz function does not exist than for the function replaced to silently fail.

When one’s code is a jumbled mess, a proper developer re-factors. They do not just ignore the mess and add more features.

I, personally, have far too much of my own code to maintain, and do this for a living, thus I cannot spend time contributing to WP core.
That said, the amount of work maintaining and supporting one WP plugin is equivalent to the entire rest of my many creations.
I created this topic merely to see if the current maintainers have any interest in modernizing the codebase, if I had the time to devote, this topic would not exist, instead you would have a commit the size of which has not been seen in years.

(BTW – The backwards compatible is mostly for old plugins that are doing_it_wrong, as we like to say)

The core developers are Holding It Wrong™ then. Do tell, what is a third-party dev going to do when there is a well-documented set of global function procedural, and no visible code breakage as you power on using the same global functions? They keep using them. You keep using them.

Since I don’t see your plugin here – http://profiles.wordpress.org/MarcherTech – I can’t guess what you’ve done, but in general, most plugins don’t take that much time to maintain.

BuddyPress, bbPress, Jetpack, Disqus, and the like of the BIG plugins are totally different, of course.

Proprietary SSO+Bridge. It is not in the public domain, but I feel willing to share some minor woes….
The closer you are to the core, the more inconsistencies you have to put up with. This is a method in one of my objects:

/*
	 * checkAuth. wp_authenticate hook.
	 * <=3.6.0 sends two strings, 3.6.1 sends an array with a size of 2
	 */

	public function checkAuth($username, $password = '') {
		$nameOrEmail = is_array($username) ? $username[0] : $username;
		$password = empty($password) ? (is_array($username) ? $username[1] : $_REQUEST['pwd']) : $password;

A hook point was changed in 3.6.1, quietly, caused quite a fuss when nobody could login. Ok, whatever, so be it, it happens. The next however is truly a sore.

if ($ipsConnect->isEnabled()) {
    function wp_logout() {
	$id = get_current_user_id();
	wp_clear_auth_cookie();
	do_action('wp_logout', $id);
    }
}

Do you see the insane logic here? However could one even do anything non-trivial on wp_logout without conflict guaranteed when we don’t even know *who* logged out? I end up overloading the global function just to pass it to the action ‘hook’ so I can actually use it. This is just a casualty of this procedural methodology. I do it this way because it raises the LEAST conflict, but I should simply be able to extend a called object, and do what I need to do and let others do as they need to in the first place.

We would LOVE you to contribute to core. Yes, it takes time, but it’ll be faster than waiting on other people. Even just an hour a week helping out gets us there faster.

You simply do not understand how truly bad it is.
You could simply rewrite the entire thing to use Laravel and Twig or Smarty and be 99% of the way there, and as free open-source, you legitly could. However, this is not something you can incrementally do, we are talking about modernizing the very core of wordpress to be tolerable and sane to the modern PHP code standards.
However, it seems everyone is waiting for everyone else to do a major rewrite. Have fun with that, and enjoy PHP 5.5.