June 7th, 2009| 
A bunch of exciting developments in the QCubed Plugins world.
First of all, by popular demand, I wrote up a bunch of examples that explain how the plugin ecosystem functions. I'm very much looking forward to your feedback on these - are they clear enough? Are they too verbose? Do they have a blind spot somewhere that needs coverage?
- Introduction to the Plugin Ecosystem
- Make Your Own Plugin, Part 1: Plugin Components
- Make Your Own Plugin, Part 2: Packaging and Distributing
Secondy, there's a now a place that aggregates all plugins that are currently available for QCubed 1.1 (it's a very simplistic first version). Note that QCubed 1.1 itself is not released yet, so these are just "sneak previews" into what we'll have at the time of the release - they are a chance for the community to provide feedback on the plugin infrastructure: Directory of QCubed Plugins.
Lastly, I've just refactored an excellent JQuery Dock component into a plugin. It's a dock that looks just like the one in MacOS, written by Enzo. Here's an example of what it look like; you'll find links to it in the Plugin Directory.
As always, we are looking for your feedback! QCubed 1.1 is coming along very well, thanks a bunch for everyone's participation!
This looks great as a replacement for simply extracting QControls.
I'm still unsure how this would work for:
Are these areas that still need discussion, or do you have suggested approaches?
New DB adapter: currently possible through QPluginMiscIncludedFile(), may want to create a special subclass for them.
New templates for codegen: supporting this requires custom development work, I'm unsure as to how custom codegen templates work at all, I havent' used them myself in the past. Vexed, if you're willing to pair up with me to make it happen, just send me a note, I'll find time to work together on it.
Mods to existing templates: I believe we agreed that we won't support these *at all*, instead encouraging folks that need mods like this to ask us to introduce hooks in the core.
I really need to spend some time looking at the code for your plugin stuff, I don't think custom codegen templates would be too difficult, at least up to the point where there are other existing modifications. Basically they're designed the same as QControls, where they are designed to be overridable, so it should just be a matter of copying them into the correct qcubed/codegen/templates folder.
Long term, I'd like to see support for modifying non-core php files as well, such as if there are existing custom templates in the qcubed/codegen/templates folder.
Congrats on this achievement! We are moving forward fast and furious ;)
Regards,
tronics
Hello guys
great job, I love the installer, in order to improve this system I upload a little patch to enable support especial characters in plugin description
More information at http://trac.qcu.be/projects/qcubed/ticket/291
Regards
enzo