Extending Plugin Capabilities with the KnowledgeTree Plugin Framework

Recently, the folks over at KTPlugins.com released the KTPlugins Plugin Framework, a new plugin that enhances the existing plugin framework. While this plugin does not add additional functionality,  it offers developers tools to build better and more advanced plugins for KnowledgeTree.

The plugin already sports a nifty feature called Advanced Triggers,  which allows developers to intercept execution and processing before the page is rendered. Another feature being planned is automated checking for new versions of existing plugins based on the framework. 

Excited to learn more, I asked Aart-Jan Boor of the KTPlugins team,  a few questions about this project and how this will be of value to developers and in turn, benefit the KnowledgeTree community.

DW: Why the need for a new framework?
AB: The KT Plugin Framework is pretty nice. I think its best features are that it enables developers to build plugins without modifying any KnowledgeTree source code and that it has some very accessible APIs to develop standard plugins like dashlets, pages, folder/document actions etc. When building more advanced plugins though, we wanted to make more precise modifications to the interface and some KnowledgeTree functionality. The current framework doesn't offer this kind of advanced functionality, like adding additional information to the document details page, for example.

DW: What are you hoping to achieve with this project?
AB: To improve the overall quality of the community developments and to prevent plugin developers from developing plugins incompatible with ours, we've released the functionality as a seperate plugin and documented its use. So, we're trying to make things easier for plugin developers to develop more advanced plugins.  This will make it easier for users to use plugins from multiple vendors. 

DW: What are the benefits of using this framework?
AB: Although one of the great advantages of open source development is being able to modify the source code, in practice, this can cause a few problems. Besides possibly losing support, the issue that bothers me most with this is that once a new version of the software is released, you have to migrate all of your modifications to the new version, making upgrading complicated.

DW: So, how does it work?
AB: To do this without modifying source code we developed a 'trick' that allows us to intercept KnowledgeTree page rendering just before the HTML is outputted to the screen. We've been using this to modify the HTML output of some pages in a few of our advanced plugins. The drawback of our trick is that only one plugin in the system can use it at a time. Of course sooner or later we were struck by this barrier and wanted to solve it. To solve this problem we developed our plugin framework which leverages this and has logic that allows multiple plugins to use this page rendering interception. 

For more information about this framework and further plugin developments, head on over to Aart-Jan's blog at http://www.ktplugins.com/plugins/blog.