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Posted by Toby A Inkster on 04/04/07 15:08
Tyno Gendo wrote:
> I have been pondering over building a "modular" site which accepts
> add-ons built by other people. I was wondering if anyone has any links
> to any reading material on how you build this kind of facility into
> your site?
The basic technique is this:
1. Provide a plugin registration function, which we'll call, say,
"plugin_register". When a plugin is loaded, it will call your
plugin_register function and tell your site at least the following
information:
1. How to use the plugin -- i.e. provide a function name
or a class name that the site can use to access the
functionality of the plugin;
2. When to use the plugin -- this is normally done via
a named hook.
So a particular plugin might be defined like this:
<?php
function tobys_plugin ()
{
echo "<!-- Hello World -->\n";
}
plugin_register('tobys_plugin', 'onpagefinished');
?>
Your plugin_register function would then add "tobys_plugin" to a list of
functions that need to be run when the page has finished outputting.
Then in the rest of your code, add you hooks. For example, at the end of
each page, you'd have:
<?php
run_plugins('onpagefinished');
?>
where run_plugins looks at the list of registered plugins and runs the ones
that have registered using that hook.
That's the simplified version. In real life, to allow the plugins to be
more useful, you'll often want to pass them particular parameters, such as
the current URL, the login name of the currently logged in user, etc. I'll
leave you to figure that out on your own.
--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux
* = I'm getting there!
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