SuperSatellite

dotCMS Plugin Joyfulness

// February 6th, 2009 // Software, Tech, Web

After some trouble fighting wih OpenJDK vs the Sun JDK, I’m ready to get my brain soaked with information on the upcoming plugin architecture in the 1.6.5c patch here at dotCMS Boot Camp.  Note on the previous comment: don’t use Open JDK, save yourself some trouble.  If you are interested in plugin development, be sure you’ve taken some time to familiarize yourself with Eclipse, and obviously you need to be familiar with coding in Java.  Plugins in dotCMS finally allow customization of the codebase without having to go in and edit core files for your system.  This will help make updates in the future substantially easier, as the core engine never has to be changed.  This is the same model most other open source systems use (think Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc).  These other systems can be extended through plugins without ever doing anything to the system itself, so when you update, you don’t have to worry about needing to merge hundreds of lines of different code.

If you want to get started until the C patch is out, just grab the codebase from the testing branch on SVN.  Also, if you use Ant in Linux, make sure you get the ant-optional package as well.  The Ant tasks are smart with the new setup, allowing you to completely override default actions in the system, like if you want to create your own form action that uses /dotCMS/submitWebForm, the process of building out the plugin will override the default actions in that Struts path.  If you want information on all the Ant tasks available within dotCMS, just run ant -p.

So, what can you extend with the plugins? Plan on being able to mess with macros, Struts actions, viewtools, language files, web.xml, Hibernate, and property files.  Create tables, add fields to structures, and allow for plugin version checking.  Basically all in all, a tool that’s gonna see a ton of use.  You’ll also be able to tie into hooks for content.  Right now that’s the only one, but more will be added as needed.  Something else that will be very useful is deploying all your server settings as a plugin, instead of changing config files and having to update the settings every time you do an upgrade.  Or, if you were moving servers, or going from a test to a live server, you can just lift the settings plugin you create and drop it right where you need it.

Plugin functionality can be downloaded over SVN from https://svn.dotcms.org/branches/releases/1.6.5 if you want to get in and start playing with it.

AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML).  There was a session on using AJAX with dotCMS involving DWR and EXTjs.  Really, the most important thing I came away with is that I’m not doing AJAX that way.  It’s simply too involved and I don’t personally have the time for it.  But that’s just my opinion.  Chris Falzone of Edinboro had a pretty simple solution involving jQuery tied to a page that just processed queries with the SQL macro.  That is a pretty painless, and easy method of essentially accomplishing the same functionality, and do so with far less JavaScript.

Okay, everything gets rounded out today with a talk on the future plans for dotCMS.   Some of the 2008 milestones: 1.6.0 and 1.6.5, the calendar, widgets, eCommerce, low level optimizations, simplified install, starter site, and the documentation site.  For 2009, some of the goals are: release of enterprise vs. open source branches, plugins, and release 1.7 (which will debut the plugin architecture and officially fork the enterprise and OS branches) and 1.8 (another note, dotMarketing is aiming on 2-3 version updates a year, with 6 months being the longest they plan on having between releases). 1.8 will introduce binary content for structures, improve functionality of the owner field, automatic content saving/drafting (in case your computer crashes in the middle of editing, etc).  Another goal: permission simplification.  It will, of course, retain the power and granularity, but adds in the power to group edit and improve the UI for working with them.  Look for improvements to multi-site hosting, mostly in terms of UI for people who might be hosting hundreds of sites in one instance of dotCMS.  They are working on push publishing, which will add the ability to send rendered pages off to other servers, as well as do things like clone one dotCMS server to another.  There are plans for several improvements to forms: new handling options, action chaining, etc.  Expect improvements to web services to extend the system.