Telling someone there’s a right way to include a plugin in a theme is like telling someone there’s a right way to cheer for the Beavers during the Oregon Civil War.

There is no right way.

However, there are still ways to do it if you absolutely need to.

Let’s admit it. As developers, we’re lazy.  We don’t like installing multiple tools when they could be bundled into one package.  We don’t like teaching our clients the difference between functionality and presentation.  We don’t like documenting the multiple items we installed on a client site so the next guy can not break things when he works on it.

We’re lazy. As a result, we try to take shortcuts whenever possible – one of those shortcuts is bundling plugins with themes to extend WordPress’ functionality.  But if you must take such a shortcut, here are the “right” ways to invoke _doing_it_wrong(). [Read more…]