Disabling individual plugins?

If you look in the documentation Creating plugins for Freelinking ver. 3, you'll see it specified as an optional argument for the $freelinking array:

• enabled [OPTIONAL]
  
  If set to FALSE, the indicator for the plugin will be ignored. As such, syntax in the text will not activate the plugin.

This is far from ideal, because if you set it FALSE, the setting is going to be overwritten every time you do a minor upgrade of freelinking.

Also, looking at the code, the built-in "enabled" argument for the $freelinking array seems to be more complex than necessary. It provides for enabling/disabling individual freelinking filters in either the context of text formats or for "all" text formats. However, creating a UI that makes use of all this flexibility seems non-trivial. Also, if one were to make use of this, the database may be populated with a large number of variables, since each possible combination of individual filter and format produces a new variable. This is abusing db variables and probably not the correct way to implement it.

Overall, the whole enable/disable framework seems to suffer from very bad UI and a severe case of featuritis, and before proceeding on this feature request, it should be looked at carefully and maybe refactored.

The overall architecture is that the default filters live in ".inc" files. An alternate, and much simpler, approach would be to have a UI for specifing what ".inc" files to load, thereby disabling all filters that live in files that are not loaded. That would also create a (slightly) better performance, as the lookup code from disabled filters would never be loaded.

Postponing for now, and downgrading to "minor". If you really want this feature, please comment and let me know whether you need:

• The full flexibility of being able to disable/enable individual filters for individual text formats; or
• Simply the ability to disable/enable a group of related filters by disabling loading the ".inc"-file they are defined in.

Closing issue for unsupported release. This is working as-is in newer releases.