Plugin system

[ericsagnes]

Not really an issue, but could it be possible and/or useful to have a plugin system?

I think Lambda Pad is a great static site generator framework, but for now every new functionality has to be written from scratch.
Even if it is not that much complicated, it could be appealing for new users to be able to use common features in an easy way.

I have implemented a few blog common features and was thinking that it could be nice to share it as a plugin.

Just an idea but for example in index.erl we could have:

plugins() ->
  [ 'blog', 'foo' ].

and then inside of site we could:

site(Data) ->
  ...
  Posts = plist:value(posts, Data),
  % paginate posts with 10 items per page
  PagedPosts = blog:paginate_data(Posts, 10),
  ...

The main concern would be how to handle the template code as it is not very generic.

For now I have:

• pagination system (about 25 lines of erlang & 2 templates)
• post tagging system & tag cloud (about 40 lines of erlang & 2 templates)
• draft management, delayed publishing and preview mode (about 45 lines of erlang & 1 template)

Feel free to close the ticket if this is out of topic.

Cheers,

[gar1t]

Apologies for the late reply - been with with other fun Erlang projects like conferences :)

This is definitely a next stage for Lambda Pad and thank you for opening this ticket. We could use this to brainstorm. I will hopefully have some cycles for this in the next week or so.

[ericsagnes]

Apologies for the late reply - been with with other fun Erlang projects like conferences :)

No problems, your talk at the Chicago conference was inspiring.

This is definitely a next stage for Lambda Pad and thank you for opening this ticket. We could use this to brainstorm. I will hopefully have some cycles for this in the next week or so.

Just a few ideas/opinions:

1. Flexibility and explicit behavior should be preserved as much as possible.
2. Plugins functionalities should be as generic as possible.
3. If a plugin provide templates, the templates should be customizable without having to edit or recompile lambda pad source.

Being able to install the plugin templates in the site path could be a compromise between 2 and 3, eg lpad-plugin plugin-name to-folder.