BuddyPress.org

@nexia

There have been relatively recent (sometimes heated) debates about the issue of plugin activation and management in the WP community. The issue you describe is just one of several that need to be addressed.

I posted this awhile back on someone’s blog post:

Plugin conflicts caused by activation sequence order are becoming more of an issue–especially with the sophisticated BuddyPress plugin. More experienced plugin devs do add code to check for the installation and activation of certain core plugins before their plugin is activated, but that is not fool proof.

I believe there is a better way to do this. There should be reserved blocks of numbers set aside for key components (plugins). These numbers would be lower in the activation sequence, therefore gaining higher priority. So, BuddyPress for instance, would always be assigned a reserved activation sequence number that is lower than any 3rd-party plugin that is developed to run on top of BuddyPress. The other way to do this is parent-child dependancies. All BuddyPress plugins would be child plugins to the parent component.