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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 3:12 pm on September 12, 2013

The Order of Things

Since WP 3.6.1, you may get odd errors like “Call to undefined function wp_validate_redirect()” errors in WP Admin where AJAX is used. The error is due to plugins that call wp_get_referer() on init.

While this will be patched more in 3.6.2, today’s quick lesson in ‘Making your plugins better’ is this simple note:

Doing anything before plugins_loaded or init is a bad idea.

If you find an affected plugin, please feel free to report it here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/25294

takien 3:24 pm on September 12, 2013

Thanks for this info bro
Mike Schinkel 4:10 pm on September 12, 2013
In general @nacin‘s advice that the only thing a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party should be doing on inclusion is add_action() and add_filter() is extremely good advice, but I’m concerned it might be taken too literally.

There are other things that can and should be done when loading files and I’d hate for people who review code for best practices for corporations but who are not really experienced with WordPress to add that literally to the list of required best practices without including some caveats.

Here are some caveats I would add to @nacin‘s advice as being okay to do on plugin inclusion:
- Capturing __FILE__ or __DIR__ into a static variable of a class for later use.
- Calling spl_autoload_register().
- Pre-parsing of environment variables such as $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] into static variables of classes.
- Defining architectural relationships between classes in a plugin that are beyond what PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php. provides at the language level, i.e. defining one class as a mixin to another and storing that information in static variables of a class.
- Possibly other things that are pure PHP/environment and/or that do not have an dependencies on the functions or classes in WordPress, depending on use-case, of course.
- Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 4:42 pm on September 12, 2013
  
  Thank you for the clarification and thoughts, Mike! 😀 +1
Andrey "Rarst" Savchenko 6:54 pm on September 12, 2013

> The error is due to plugins that call wp_get_referer() on init.

You probably meant on load rather than init?
Knut Sparhell 5:05 pm on September 14, 2013

Maybe more precise: Calling any WordPress functions, except add_action() and add_filter(), on pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party inclusion is a bad idea.
- brasofilo 5:08 am on October 17, 2013
  Knut, just to clarify my ignorance, what do you guys refer as “pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party inclusion”? I suppose it’s an activated plugin start up…. Normally, if it’s the case, I call
```
if( is_admin() )
    add_action( 'plugins_loaded', 'start_everything' );
```
  I also suppose is_admin() is not a bad idea, is it?