I must admit to jumping into the plugin writing before reading all the getting started stuff. Having read into it more I am starting to understand how the filters work. It makes it very easy to look at the template and filter what you want.

Is there a trac ticket somewhere that explains how it might change?

I have only a couple of minor thoughts to add to your excellent post.

Habari also allows you to manually register functions/methods as plugin sinks using the Plugins::register() method. This could be useful for when you want to do only one of multiple things based on a configuration option, and register only the correct function. Of course, you could just as easily do this with a switch() within the automatically registered function.

The filter_post_content_out() function is interesting in that it affects the output of $post->content_out. $post->content contains the actual post body content. Adding the “_out” suffix allows it to be modified by that specific filter.

Using this mechanism, you can create multiple suffixes that filter in different ways. You could, for example, output $post->content_summary and then code a plugin function filter_post_content_suffix() to alter just that output. If a filter for a suffix doesn’t exist, it just outputs the full content, so nothing breaks. This can be useful for outputting post archive listings specially for just the archive pages, or on any page.

This bit of functionality is probably not documented well because we’re (at least I am) expecting it to change slightly to improve filtering and output support, but that’s how and why things are named as they are.

I’m looking forward to part 2!

@Rick, Thanks for linking to those pages. I have been using those and really should have linked to them in the article.

@Skippy, so far I haven’t done anything that isn’t documented but once I do I will certainly look to add to the documentation.

@Matt, thanks for the clarification. The documentation suggests that it is required although it doesn’t state it outright. Consider the tabs done as of the next update.

@Mike, I am looking forward to the admin pages bit a lot as I think there are UI helper classes, which means I won’t have to write any.

I’m looking forward to the plugin info for adding to the admin pages – thinking about creating a theme/plugin editor for the admin.

Actaully that is not true. You can name the folder anything you want and the plugin file [anything].plugin.php. So you do not need to make them match.

And this is a great post! Thanks for doing it. And nice idea about the plugin wizard (can you make it use tabs instead of spaces ;) ).

And of course, you’re invited to help us generate that documentation! Your introduction here demonstrates a terrific understanding of what new plugin authors need to gain proficiency.