BluePrint: Plugins

Introduction

Plugins allow people to extend Sahana Eden without their code needing to be added to Trunk & yet keeping their Trunk install conmpletely clean.

This helps prevent merge conflicts between different deployment branches & hence reduces the risk of forking.

Use-Cases

End-User

The End-User wishes to be able to browse a repository of plugins, viewing their names, descriptions & who maintains them. They wish to be able to click on a plugin to easily install them into their running instance of Eden.

Developer

The Developer wishes to be able to develop new functionality which extends a base Eden install without needing to have anything added to Trunk.

This functionality may include:

• Modules
  • Models
  • Controllers
• Template
  • Settings
  • Prepop
  • Controller Customizations
  • Parsers
• Theme
  • Views
  • CSS
• Widgets
  • Applying the Widgets to existing modules would be done in controller customizations in templates

Design

• A plugin is a Web2Py application which acts as a co-app to the main Eden instance.
• The plugin will have standard files to identify itself to Eden:
  • Metadata (Name, Description, Maintainer)
  • Menu entries
  • List of Modules to be added to Auth UI
• The Eden instance can be configured with a list of plugins using settings.plugins = ["plugin1", "plugin2"]
  • This could be done in either models/000_config.py or a Template (unless this plugin includes the Template!)
  • Q: How can we download these from a URL if not found?
• S3Menu to be extended to read the settings & add additional menu entries found in those folders
  • Templates which don't use S3Menu will not support these, but that's seen as a bug in these templates

Future extensions

Implementation

Once implemented the design will move here:

• DeveloperGuidelines/Plugins

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BluePrints