Get Plugin Path from within Plugin still problematic! Needs core function!

[q2apro]

This is a well known topic but has not yet been resolved. @svivian I cannot find the original discussion in the qa-forum, but this problem is so important that I need to issue it here.

Situation: Often programmers need to point to some files like CSS or JS that is located in their plugin folder.

Problem: How to get the correct path to the plugin, under all possible circumstances.

The approach until now:

1. Create a layer.
2. And code like that (example from one of the q2apro plugins):

class qa_html_theme_layer extends qa_html_theme_base {

// needed to get the plugin url
function qa_html_theme_layer($template, $content, $rooturl, $request)
{
    if(qa_opt('q2apro_bestusers_enabled')) {
        global $qa_layers;
        $this->plugin_url_bestuserspro = $qa_layers['q2apro Best Users Layer']['urltoroot'];
    }
    qa_html_theme_base::qa_html_theme_base($template, $content, $rooturl, $request);
}
// ...

Now I can use $this->plugin_url_bestuserspro everywhere to get the path.

WRONG!

If the user has not enabled friendly URLs, but uses queries / URLs such as domain.com/index.php?qa=208&qa_1=24 the output looks like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./index.php?qa=qa-plugin&qa_1=q2apro-best-users-pro&qa_2=styles.css">

And leads to a 404 not found!

So my urgent request: Please provide a core function that you throw in the plugin name and that returns the correct path, which should work for all URL structures.

---

My not-foolproof workaround for now:

            // option_neat_urls is set to userfriendly URLs that path is correctly set
            $neaturls = qa_opt('neat_urls');
            if($neaturls==1) {
                $this->output('<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="'.qa_path($this->plugin_url_bestuserspro).'styles.css">');
            }
            else {
                // important: if user changes the plugin folder name it will not work!
                $this->output('<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="'.qa_opt('site_url').'qa-plugin/q2apro-best-users-pro/styles.css">');
            }
        }
// insert CSS file
function head_script(){
    qa_html_theme_base::head_script();
    if(qa_opt('q2apro_bestusers_enabled')) {
        if($this->request == 'bestusers' || $this->request == 'bestusers-year') {
            // option_neat_urls is set to userfriendly URLs that path is correctly set
            $neaturls = qa_opt('neat_urls');
            if($neaturls==1) {
                $this->output('<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="'.qa_path($this->plugin_url_bestuserspro).'styles.css">');
            }
            else {
                // important: if user changes the plugin folder name it will not work!!!
                $this->output('<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="'.qa_opt('site_url').'qa-plugin/q2apro-best-users-pro/styles.css">');
            }
        }
    }
}

[svivian]

Just noting here that after a bunch of searching I found the discussion we had was on issue #42 here on Github. Will check into this soon.

[svivian]

OK unless I'm misunderstanding your issue, you should be able to just use the QA_HTML_THEME_LAYER_URLTOROOT constant, as described in the docs: http://www.question2answer.org/layers.php

So you can get rid of the class contructor (qa_html_theme_layer function) and instead of using $this->plugin_url_bestuserspro put QA_HTML_THEME_LAYER_URLTOROOT instead.

[q2apro]

It works!

Such good news. This should be communicated to all developers who still use the "old" method. This way, no plugin will break anymore.

Thanks a lot for your time spent to solve the problem!

PS: And QA_HTML_THEME_LAYER_DIRECTORY to get the server path for the plugin!