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Hacking a WordPress Plugin, Version 100
By Robert Campbell on Monday, August 3rd, 2009
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This is a quick little tip for you WordPress users that like to hack or change your plugins. If you are like me, you often end up hacking or customizing the code within some of your plugins. What happens when that plugin version has been updated by the author though, and you just clicked update? Ouch! You just lost the changes you made.
What I Used To Do
What I used to do to avoid this was keep a text file in the plugin folder that had notes of the changes. That used to work, when I remembered it was there. Being that this is in the Used To Do paragraph, obviously I didn’t always remember. More like hardly ever.
What I Do Now
What I do now while editing the plugin is change the plugin version to 100. It’s easy to do. Just look for the version number in the top of the main plugin php file. It should be in the remark. Then change it to 100.
Now when there is a plugin update, you can see right away that you made a change or not by looking at the versions numbers. I have been doing this for about a month now, and I haven’t messed one up yet. My hack? Version 100.
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