Plugins: Developer Guide

Draft-in-progress documenting ThinkUp’s existing plugin architecture.

See also:

• Plugins: Architecture Wishlist
• Plugins: Simple Plugins to Build
• Plugins: How to Build a ThinkUp Plugin

The PluginHook Parent Class

The key parent class is PluginHook, in /thinkup/webapp/common/. You can register callback methods on the PluginHook class, but you don’t do that directly. The Crawler and Webapp classes—both intialized on every page in init.php extend PluginHook—which means you can register callback methods on them.

With Crawler and Webapp instantiated, the plugin files get included and register their callbacks. Webapp and Crawler execute those callbacks at the appropriate places in their execution. For example, the Webapp object executes the configuration callback on the plugin configuration screen.