Plugin System Beginnings

[ionrock]

With regard to plugins...

I am working on it and the it looks like there will be a few main things that a plugin will need.

1) A main backend file. Consider this the main() of your plugin. It will be responsible for handling any variables and doing things like initiating access to a database, file, or forms for entering data.

2) A main frontend file. Since most plugins will need some sort of way to be displayed in the front end this will be how it is displayed. The frontend functions will look through installed plugins and then when if finds one will look for whatever the plugin says to look for and output the results. This means your main frontend file must be the mechanism for doing this.

3) An installer file. This will be a script which will create any files, add tables, make directories, etc. This needs to be very well tested so you don't have some crazy recursive function creating some ridiculus file hierarchy forever.

I hope that helps anyone makeing addons and such to phpwcms so you can start making plugins more compatible with potential future plugin systems. There may be other requirements but for the most part this is what is required. If you have questions about how to add a plugins menu item so you can really keep things separate please let me know and I can give you a little code.

At the moment I am working on registering plugins so a new user would just upload a plugin (a directory with files) to a plugin directory and then register it in the admin similar to the ftp file takeover. Everything is looking good and if people who start making mods start making them more like I described above, things will move much easier when the real plugin system is developed.

As always comments, questions, etc. are welcomed.

[marco]

With the growing number of hacks, it will be more and more difficult to integrate and keep them up to date with the core wcms code. A plugin interface is probably one of the top core ehancements needed right now.

Here's a simple CMS (Poseidon at wonko.com) that has a simple, yet very powerful plugin interface. The thing is coded superbly, and, what's rare these days, it is also very well documented.

I am posting the links here hoping that something similar might be developed for wcms. Not knowing the inner details of wcms I am not sure if developign a plugin API is a simple or very complex job; anyway, I think checking this script out is well worth your while.

The Poseidon plugin examples are here:
http://wonko.com/poseidon/pluginlib.php

Do check out the plugin code, it is very easy to follow.

This guy developed some nice extensions using the plugin API:
http://greystork.com/content.php?title= ... Extensions

The entire Poseidon cms is documented here:
http://wonko.com/poseidon/docs/docsource/docs-txt.html

The documentation for the plugin API is here:
http://wonko.com/poseidon/docs/www/lib/ ... s-php.html