At the moment, the plugin topic for a plugin is always parsed to recover the preferences values. This is rather inefficient, as well as encouraging bad practice (writing to documentation topics in TWiki web). It is also potentially insecure, as it's all to easy for plugin authors to dump sensitive data like passwords into plugin topics without realising what they are doing.
It would be far more efficient if:
- Plugins authors were encouraged to use
$TWiki::cfg
to store configuration values by default, and standard preferences otherwise
- The plugin topic could be skipped if plugin preferences are not used.
- The plugin author was able to define preferences such as SHORTDESCRIPTION in the plugin code instead of the topic.
CC
This is actually Waiting for Release, but set to Actioning to give people a chance to register it.
CC
Waiting for Release
KJL
What happens with plugin preferences on a pre TWiki 4.1 installation if they are not in the plugin topic?
AC
Putting preferences into the plugin topic in Dakar is bad news as they cannot be further overridden due to the Dakar preference precedence bug --
TW
Updated headline for release notes. Also changed to enhancement.
KJL
4.1.0 released
KJL