Building a Tuiyo Plug-in

Written by Administrator Sunday, 09 August 2009 23:17

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This tutorial will go through the basics of a Tuiyo™ plug-in, the various types of plug-ins, process of building a simple Tuiyo™ plug-ins. We will then describe a simple extension to the Tuiyo™ event listener and trigger work-flow, to enable you build highly extensible Tuiyo™ applications

A Tuiyo™ Plug-in is a single PHP class, which extends TuiyoEventsListener class. Various plug-ins groups exists, which (for now) include profile plug-ins, system plug-ins, and admin plug-ins. Each plug-in is stored in a single file, stored in the plug-in sub-directory group of the front end component i.e components/com_tuiyo/plugin/{plugin group}/.

It is important not to confuse a plug-in with an application, as plug-ins are mainly a collection of methods responding to specific triggers, such as onUserProfileUpdate. The goal is simple, "to provide a simple hooking system, that is independent of the normal application process flow, allowing third-party developers to 'plug-in' external functionality, at specified points in processing". Such a hooking system implies we now have a simple yet effective, and customization, JavaScript style event handling all through out the application. Strictly speaking, a Tuiyo™ plug-in is a registered event listener

1. Defining the basic anatomy of Tuiyo plug-in

<?php
  
 defined('TUIYO_EXECUTE') || die('Restricted access');
 
/**
  * A Welcome (profileGroup) plugin
  * Sends a welcome message on profile create
  * @package Tuiyo For Joomla
  * @copyright 2009
  * @version $Id$
  * @access public
  */
 class TuiyoPluginWelcome extends TuiyoEventsListener{
   
   /**
    * Send a welcome PMS to a user who creates a new profile
    * @param  mixed $args
    * @return void
    */
    public function onProfileCreate($args=NULL){
 
       //Now send this guy a friendly welcome

    }
 }
?>

Regardless of the plug-in group type, all at the exception of timelinebots have this basic structure. The naming of your classes are very important. Exactly the same naming convention used in joomla. Just as a Tuiyo controller class is named TuiyoController{controllerName} and a model TuiyoModel{modelName}, a plug-in class must be named as TuiyoPlugin{pluginName} and must extend the TuiyoEventsListener class for it to be registered an parsed when triggered.

Last Updated on Monday, 10 August 2009 03:46