Your way to include vBSEO-scripts can lead to errors

Hi,

i habe discovered a slight incompatibility between vBSEO and another modification speeding up my plugins.

This other modification (from Andreas @ vbulletin-germany.org) moves the plugin-codes from database to filesystem. This way, the execution of plugin-code can benefit from PHP-Caches like APC. In my case vBulletin gets really faster this way.

The files containing the plugin-codes are located in /includes/plugins/{hookname}.php.

Now comes vBSEO into play. It does not work anymore after activating the mentioned modification. Why? Well ... in several hooks you use the following code to include other parts of vBSEO:

PHP Code:

@include_once(dirname(__FILE__).'/functions_vbseo.php'); 


The statements "dirname(__FILE__).'/functions_vbseo.php'" normally resolves to "{path}/includes/functions_vbseo.php", which is correct. Having the code in an sub-directory as mentioned above, the same statement resolves to "{path}/includes/plugins/functions_vbseo.php" and represents an invalid path. The result is a completely disabled vBSEO - not even the copyright notice comes up in the footer.

Is this your problem? I think so. If you'd followed the vBulletin-Codingstandards, you'd included the scripts like this:

PHP Code:

@include_once(DIR . '/includes/functions_vbseo.php'); 


which is always correct and works like a charm.


The question is: Why did you decide to take this unconventional approach using "dirname(__FILE__)" to include scripts? To offer a wide interoperability with other modifications is a / can be a significant quality-feature for vBSEO. In this case you can achieve this just by following the vB-Codestandards.

Please take this into consideration.


kind regards,
Gérome

Hello,

This other modification (from Andreas @ vbulletin-germany.org) moves the plugin-codes from database to filesystem.

Thank you for your comments, that will be supported in the next vBSEO build (current is 3.2.0RC5).