I’ve had some more time to think about plugins and what they are or should be. I’ve come to the conclusion that even though it is nice to be compatible, plugins in ZenMagick will take a rather different direction in the middle and long term.

Adding  ads to the blog has given me time to play around with wordpress plugins and even though it’s far streched to compare wordpress and zen-cart, I quite like the way plugins integrate into the overal architecture.

I haven’t thought this all the way through, but I think what I would like to implement should enable plugins to:

•  add configuration pages to the admin interface (whatever that might be)
  I really struggle with the current limitations, in particular with not being able to simply add a custom form, linkt to click, etc
• keep the main plugin class to stay simple
  This could be archived by having methods that query the services the plugin requires. Individual services could then be implemented in separate classes
• define general access points that should provide access to request data to plugins
  One that is quite obvious is the returned (HTML) contents. Plugins could include content filter implementations that would be able to modify the contents generated by the controller/view before actually returning it.

Definitley work-in-progress, but exciting, nevertheless! I think I’ll spend some more time investigatin how other apps handle plugins before making up my mind. Suggestions for applications that have a good plugin system worth borrowing from are welcome…