SuperSatellite

Two dotCMS Plugins Released

// March 11th, 2009 // Software, Web

With the plugin architecture in dotCMS launched with the release of the version 1.7 release candidates, several of us are getting started testing out the water.  To get things started, I’ve released two plugins this week you can download and install.  Nothing huge, but hopefully helpful to some folks.

XMLTool Plugin

The XMLTool plugin creates a view tool that gives you access to the Apache XMLTool class so that you can import and parse XML data into an HTML page.  This allows behavior similar to XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation), so that you can manipulate and transform the data in an XML document into XHTML.  All you have to do is drop it in and deploy it to get access.  Full details, download, and an example can be found in the forums.

reCAPTCHA Form Verification Plugin

The second plugin is integration of the reCAPTCHA API (Application Program Interface) into the form handler so that if you don’t like the built in captcha generator, or prefer reCAPTCHA’s, you can use it with this.  It creates a new Struts action and macro, combined with a modified version of the submitWebFormAction class.  As with the XMLTool, download, example, etc at the forums.  This takes just a couple changes to a form to use: you need to point the form action to /dotCMS/submitFormRecaptcha and drop the recaptcha() macro somewhere inside the <form> tag.  Additional documentation is in Macro Help after you deploy it.

If you’re using dotCMS, give the plugins a download and try, and let me know what you think.  Also let me know if you have problems.  I am aware that the XMLTool complains about its scope at startup.  It will run normally though, but I am trying to see what’s up with the scope to correct that warning.