MachCMS 1.1 – Plugins

Soon after I deployed MachCMS 1.0, a feature I need was plugins. So here is my plan.

There will be a plugins folder. This folder contains plugins with this mapping.

PluginFolder.plugin
– PluginFolder.php

This will allow a few basic things. The .plugin folder extension simply identifies it as a plugin to the user installing it.
Inside this folder there must be a PHP file with the same name as the folder with the extension. This PHP file can load other files inside this plugin folder.

The plugin’s PHP file can contain any valid PHP code and simply outputs everything directly which is caught by an output buffer.

Now how do pages use these plugins? In a virtual page, you can embed a plugin using this syntax:
[plugin:[myPlugin1][myPlugin2]…]
Like this you can embed more than one plugin in a single area. There are loaded in the order specified.

In a hard page you can use this syntax:
load_plugins(‘myPlugin1,myPlugin2 …’);

Now to implement this in an efficient way…