felixarntz/felixarntz-mu-plugins

My collection of MU plugins in individual files within a subdirectory, fully configurable in a maintainable way which allows for automatic updates.

1.3.1 2024-10-24 17:56 UTC

Requires

• php: >=7.0

Requires (Dev)

• phpcompatibility/php-compatibility: ^9.3
• wp-coding-standards/wpcs: ^3.0

GPL-2.0-or-later

README

My collection of MU plugins in individual files within a subdirectory, fully configurable in a maintainable way which allows for automatic updates. Learn more about MU plugins.

1. Context
2. Project structure
3. Quick start
4. Included features
5. Alternative usage
6. License

Context

I have been using MU plugins on my personal sites for many years, and I thought some may find them useful as well. I am aware that several individuals and companies have open-sourced some of their MU plugins, but I wanted to go a step further than that by making them actually reusable beyond just my own specific site needs.

With this repository I came up with an approach that allows you to use any of my MU plugins in a way that allows you to customize them and even apply updates to them, without having to manually copy files every time.

Project structure

At a high level, the project is made up by three components:

• The individual MU plugin files felixarntz-mu-plugins/*.php, where each file is for a single standalone feature.
• Some shared utility files felixarntz-mu-plugins/shared/*.php, which some of the individual MU plugin files are using.
• The overarching loader file felixarntz-mu-plugins.php, which loads and configures the individual MU plugin files that you would like to use.

Quick start

Installation

There are several alternative ways to use this project, depending on your needs and flexibility. In any case, the project needs to be placed in your wp-content/mu-plugins directory. If your site doesn't have such a directory yet, you can simply create it.

If you use Composer to manage your site's dependencies:

composer require felixarntz/felixarntz-mu-plugins

Otherwise, you can clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/felixarntz/felixarntz-mu-plugins.git wp-content/mu-plugins/felixarntz-mu-plugins

Or, if you prefer to go fully manual, you can download a ZIP of the repository and extract it into your wp-content/mu-plugins directory.

After installing the project, you need to copy the wp-content/mu-plugins/felixarntz-mu-plugins/felixarntz-mu-plugins.php file one level up, i.e. to wp-content/mu-plugins/felixarntz-mu-plugins.php. Afterwards, you need to edit your copy of the file, specifically the Loader::FILES_DIR constant, to point to the correct location of the felixarntz-mu-plugins directory containing the individual MU plugin files. You should furthermore edit that file to customize which features you want to load and to configure them (see next section).

Configuration

The project includes a many features, enhancements, and tweaks, some of which are more opinionated than others. You'll most certainly want to customize which features are loaded for your site and how they are configured. You can do so by tweaking your own copy of the loader file wp-content/mu-plugins/felixarntz-mu-plugins.php.

The class in the file contains two arrays that are intended to be modified:

• The indexed array returned by the Loader::files_allowlist() method should contain the list of MU plugin PHP file names (i.e. features) which should be loaded.
• The associative array returned by the Loader::config() method should contain your preferred configuration for the features.

Both methods are initially populated with all the available MU plugin files and configuration variables respectively, so that it's easy to see what is available. Since the arrays are returned by methods, feel free to use simple conditional logic to contextually set different configurations. For example, if you're using this project in a WordPress Multisite, you could return different arrays depending on which site is being accessed (get_site()).

Please see the class's inline documentation for additional information on how to make those modifications.

Updates

To apply updates to the project later, if you use Composer, a simple composer update will do it. Otherwise, you need to update the wp-content/mu-plugins/felixarntz-mu-plugins directory with the latest version, either via git pull from within the directory, or by downloading the latest ZIP and replacing the directory with its contents.

Included features

Each feature is implemented within a single MU plugin file. Note that the features definitely vary in how opinionated there are, so please use and adjust to taste. Even I myself am not using all of these features for every site, so I encourage you to pick and choose what works for you.

The following tables list all features available as part of this project, grouped by what kind of feature it is.

Admin UI enhancements

Block editor modifications

Disabling core functionality

Cleanup of wp_head

Performance optimization

Miscellaneous

Alternative usage

It is recommended that you use the approach from the quick start section above, where you install the project into its own directory within your wp-content/mu-plugins folder, and then copy the felixarntz-mu-plugins.php file from the project one level up. This has multiple benefits:

• You can apply updates the project at any point by simply replacing the directory with its newer version.
• You can customize the configuration via the copied wp-content/mu-plugins/felixarntz-mu-plugins.php file without losing these customizations when you update.
• (Optional) If you use Composer to manage your site's dependencies, you can handle updates automatically by including the project in your composer.json file.

Alternatively, you can put the felixarntz-mu-plugins directory as well as the felixarntz-mu-plugins.php file from the project directly into your wp-content/mu-plugins folder. While this approach still allows you to update and customize, it makes the process a bit more complicated as you have to manually only replace the felixarntz-mu-plugins directory within the project so that you don't overwrite your customizations to the felixarntz-mu-plugins.php file. Last but not least, this approach doesn't work if you want to be able to update the project using Composer. So there are no benefits to this approach.

If you don't want to use the entire project, you could also pick individual files from within the felixarntz-mu-plugins directory, plus the felixarntz-mu-plugins/shared directory, and put them directly into your wp-content/mu-plugins folder. However, this approach is not recommended. While it may seem like a lightweight solution if you only need a few of the features, it really makes maintenance unnecessarily complicated without any benefit, unless you never plan to update those files. The project only loads the files that you want to be loaded anyway, so the mere presence of files with features you don't need doesn't have any notable memory or performance impact.

License

This plugin is free software, and is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or (at your option) any later version. See LICENSE for complete license.