Geeklog Plugin Developers Handbook

By Blaine Lang and Tom Willett        December, 2002

Copyright (c) 2002 Blaine Lang, Tom Willett and Vincent Furia

Contents:

 

Introduction and Forward:

This document and accompanying files are intended to make developing plugins and blocks for Geeklog - The Ultimate Weblog System easier. Our work is dependent upon the developers who wrote Geeklog and continue to expand and support it: Tony Bibbs, Dirk Haun, Jeffrey Schoolcraft, Jason Whittenburg, Matt Braafhart, Mark Limburg, Gene Wood, Yanick Bourbeau, and Tane Piper. It is based on the earlier documentation written by Tony Bibbs and the collective knowledge contained in the mailing lists and websites devoted to Geeklog. The Moderation API documentation was provided by Vincent Furia.

This documentation was developed with Geeklog version 1.3.7 in mind, but it should work with minor variations for earlier 1.3 versions and should apply to future versions in the 1.3 series. The next major version of Geeklog (v 2) will have a different plugin interface.

The following suggestions about Programming Style, the use of Templates and Language Files, and Geeklog's Way of Doing Things are simply that -- suggestions. You can choose not to follow them and have a perfectly valid plugin or block. Following these suggestions will make your job easier in the long run and make your code more usable by others.

This excerpt for the original Geeklog Plugin Developer Documentation by Tony Bibbs aptly summarizes the place plugins play in the Geeklog project.

Geeklog is becoming more and more popular each day and we, the Geeklog developers, are amazed at some of the great hacks people have made to extend their Geeklog installation to fit their own needs.  At the same time, the Geeklog development team is continually adding new features that make Geeklog even better. We have realized the need for Geeklog to support two threads of development: core Geeklog code and plugin code. By building in the infrastructure needed to extend Geeklog's functionality through plugins we can make a clean separation between the Geeklog codebase and plugin code so that we can concentrate on making Geeklog's core code better while others can develop plugins so that Geeklog fits their needs. With that said, Geeklog now has a Plugin application program interface (API).

At the highest level, the Geeklog Plugin API is generic code that is called in strategic places in the Geeklog codebase that allow function of plugins to be called. This will allow your plugin the following features:


Prev Next