A few weeks ago Thaya of Omninoggin produced an add on to my Fun with Sidebar Tabs plugin. He asked my if I would update the plugin to include that code and I agreed, but I haven’t done it and here’s why.

I did actually go ahead and add in Thaya’s code because I thought his addition was really great; however, the first time I tried it on a clean(ish) install it didn’t work perfectly. He had anticipated this and provided comments in the code where changes could be made to turn off a particular feature. Since then I have debated whether to commit the change and I have decided not to.

I stopped supporting Fun with Sidebar Tabs because it has a serious flaw. It relies on CSS specificity within the theme not overriding the CSS settings and it relies on previous Javascript being bug free to run. Those two things cause problems and in return requests for help which I just don’t have the time to respond to in a timely fashion.

I debated including the new code as an option, just switch the files over and you have it, I debated just including it and letting users modify it in the code if they wanted to turn off a particular function, but ultimately I decided that I didn’t want to risk providing an updated that prevented the plugin working where people already used it, I didn’t think that many users would have the confidence to change the files themselves, that most users would update the plugin automatically without checking what was in it, and I also didn’t want to give the impression that I was making updates to the plugin.

As I said, I did make the change, so if you want to download the updated javascript file you can do so here, but I won’t be committing it to the repository for the reasons I’ve explained. All credit for the update goes to Thaya who is producing some really great plugins at the moment and had the wherewithall to make the extra code for this one.