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So, if a plugin should not ever be installed on an older version of WordPress, whats the best way to go about it? What I normally do is something like this:

if ( ! function_exists( 'get_post_format' ) ) {
    $error_handler = set_error_handler( 'my_plugin_die' );
    trigger_error( '', E_USER_ERROR );
}

function my_plugin_die( $errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline ) {
    global $wp_version;
    exit( 'This plugin requires WordPress version 3.0 or greater. You are currently using version ' . $wp_version . '. Please <a target="_top" href="' . esc_url( admin_url( 'update-core.php' ) ) . '">upgrade to the latest version of WordPress</a> before installing this plugin.' );
}

I place this straight in the plugin file - outside of any class. It seems to work well in all of my testing, but seems rather harsh. Is there any chance of a plugin having this code will ever be activated?

How to you deal with situations like this? There seems to be absolutely no documentation on this kind of thing.

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I think you're taking the right approach: version-checking and die. The only thing I might recommend would be to hook it into the Plugin activation hook.

Out of curiosity, though: why aren't you using wp_die() (Codex ref)?

As a side note: I would love to see the Theme and Plugin repositories implement some sort of UI similar to AMO, that indicates whether a given Theme/Plugin is compatible with the user's current WordPress version. Plugins have a Requires: WordPress-version header tag that would work sufficiently for this functionality, and I would think that Themes could implement the same, just as easily.

p.s. I would strongly recommend against using the "Compatibility rating"; that functionality is beyond broken.

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  • Plugin activation hook might be a good idea. I'll have to look into it and do some testing. wp_die() is anot a good choice here imo. The goal is to have a message printed in the little yellow box where the plugins errors are printed when they cannot be installed. Doesn't make sense to me to bring the user to a page that they have probably never seen before that has no navigation.
    – mfields
    Jul 17, 2011 at 19:12
  • Hmm... let's investigate, and see if there's a way to hook into that particular Admin Alert. There probably is...
    – Chip Bennett
    Jul 17, 2011 at 19:21
  • Thanks for taking a look :) I haven't treally looked into this too deeply since 3.0. At that time this was the only method I found that provided the results that I was after.
    – mfields
    Jul 17, 2011 at 20:00

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