Item2095: Add flexibility to ADDTOHEAD

We are having some practical problems with ADDTOHEAD, see Item2066. The parameter requires does not allow to insert blocks before/in between other blocks.

Solution:

• add params before and after

-- ArthurClemens - 18 Sep 2009

I have had a need for a feature like this in my own work (making something load before TMCE).

I have some other ideas and concerns regarding ADDTOHEAD as a piece of infrastructure for skins and plugins though... but I'll work that up in the Development web one day.

-- PaulHarvey - 13 Dec 2009

is this still needed with the changes for ZonePlugin and the rest?

-- WillNorris - 03 Apr 2010

No. Custom zones could be a way to get JS in front of all the other added parts, but within a zone you still want the ability to go before certain .js files. We still need a before param.

-- PaulHarvey - 04 Apr 2010

Surely the requires param of ADDTOZONE addresses this? Assuming all ADDTOZONE calls have a tag, that is.

Marking for Paul's feedback, since he seems to understand....

-- CrawfordCurrie - 24 Jun 2010

The requires param only caters for where you want to ensure something follows a tag. It does not help when you want something prior to the tag.

For example, some jquery libs (it's been a while, but superfish I think) will use different initialisation code-paths depending on presence of other plugins. In the case of superfish, I seem to recall that it will look for and magically make use of supersubs and hoverintent.

On one hand: we do not want superfish to always require supersubs/hoverintent, because they may be superfluous to a particular application. On the other hand, there's no other way for a Foswiki dev to ensure that these are inserted before the superfish.js other than to hack the superfish dependency, maybe with a new mysuperfish plugin.

In reality, superfish has ways for a dev to force re-initialisation or otherwise manually invoke the plugin on DOM elements with forced params to use the extra plugin functionality; still, it seems like we're missing a feature here.

I'm making this confirmed, but with enhancement priority.

-- PaulHarvey - 24 Jun 2010