From stefdawson on July 21, 2009 10:30:44

Is it desirable to make the plugin load order more deterministic when
dealing with plugin files in the cache? At the moment it seems to loosely
be the order they were uploaded to the directory, but altering a file and
re-uploading it to the cache doesn't necessarily change its load order.

Similarly, changing its filename sometimes does and sometimes does not
change its load order. This appears to be a feature of glob() or possibly
the underlying file inodes.

If the output of glob() was sorted by some arbitrary means (filename?) in
load_plugins(), at least site admins have the option of renaming files to
promote/demote plugins, and can thus alter the order they appear on the
Extensions tab. Would also benefit plugin systems with multiple files in a
suite, to guarantee load behaviour.

Any better ideas?

Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/textpattern/issues/detail?id=17