It all started when a number of us over at Classy Llama decided to stop using the Done Done issue tracking service and move to a self-hosted Active Collab based project management system. We weren’t merely moving to Active Collab for issue tracking, we needed a way to track time, along with a hoard of other things. Tracking time was something that we’d been doing in Unfuddle, but it wasn’t working very well because it was separate from our issue tracking software, and we couldn’t let clients onto Unfuddle due to it’s limited access control abilities.
In some rare cases there is functionality that clients need me to develop that requires disabling some built-in observers due to them conflicting with the desired custom behavior. There are also some that aren’t needed by everyone that you can gain a performance boost from by disabling. I have previously disabled a few observers by rewriting the observer model and returning NULL inside the observer method. Brought to light by Colin M.
One thing that I don’t particularly care for is hard-coding snippets of text into themes, especially if there’s a possibility that they may need to be changed down the road. Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t have anything to suit out-of-the-box. With the release of WordPress 3.0, however, custom post types were introduced, which are entirely perfect for this! What I did is add a custom post type of “variable” that are not public, have a UI in the admin and support the title, editor and excerpt.