There's a bunch of ways to do plugins in PHP, some OO some not. In the CMS I use at work, I think I have 2 or 3 different methods in use in various places. :-) If this is for Drupal specifically, then there's really just two ways to reasonably consider: 1) Do you want other modules to be able to define these plugins? If so, then the Drupal Way(tm) is to define a hook. You would call something like: module_invoke_all('mymoduleapi', 'anoperation', $someparameter); And other modules can simply declare a function: function othermodule_mymoduleapi($op, $stuff) { ... } And do whatever. Hooking those together is handled magically by Drupal. See hook_block(), hook_nodeapi(), etc. for examples. 2) Do you want people to just drop .inc files into a plugins directory inside your module? For that, look at the flexinode module, which does exactly that. (There are lots of others, but that's the first one that comes to mind.) I've not looked at its guts in detail, but that's the direction you'd want to go. As for what gets included, If you're module is enabled then Drupal will automatically include your mymodule.module file on every page load, but that's it. You can include/require whatever else you need/want. Note that it is NOT included into the global namespace, so if you put stuff outside of a function (which you shouldn't do), it won't be happening globally. http://api.drupal.org/ - Your new best friend. :-) On Thursday 04 May 2006 22:09, Dan Robinson wrote:

Hi,

I want to introduce a concept of "plugins" to my module. In this case the plugin merely needs to supply a single function that returns data. Is the best way to do this to have the plugin call a register function with the name of a function (and then call "eval"?). This is probably more of a PHP question than a Drupal question. Oh yes and is there documentation somewhere on what code Drupal automatically "includes"?

Thanks,

Dan

-- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 larry@garfieldtech.com ICQ: 6817012 "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

On May 4, 2006, at 10:09 PM, Dan Robinson wrote:

I want to introduce a concept of "plugins" to my module. In this case the plugin merely needs to supply a single function that returns data.

The ecommerce package might be a good source of inspiration for this. It doesn't use plugins but keeps in-line with the Drupal hook system, meaning other modules can tap into the ecommerce API. There's an api for products, payments, the checkout process, etc. I also opted to use *.module files instead of includes with the intentions being that any component of the ecommerce package could also be used by itself. For example, I just want a shopping cart because I already have another product creation system. Hope that helps! Matt Westgate | www.lullabot.com