Internal Structure

In v12 the internal structure of plugins was fundamentally reworked.

Plugin Manager

The PluginManager.php controls all plugins and invokes the lifecycle operations. All additional services that have effect on the plugin lifecycle are injected into the manager.

Plugin Manifest

The PluginManifest.php is responsible of parsing and accessing the manifest file. With the getTagNodes(string $xpath) is the easiest way to retrive manifest values.

When a Service is dependent on manifest entries, it should implement the ManifestContent interface.

    function getManifestValue(Plugin $plugin){
        $manifest = PluginManifest::fromPlugin($plugin);
        $authors = $manifest->getTagNodes('author/authors');
        dd($authors);
        
        $looksLike = [
            [
               "tag" => "author",
                "text" => "Erin Example",
                "attributes" => []
            ],            [
               "tag" => "author",
                "text" => "Erin Example",
                "attributes" => []
            ]
       ]
    }

Plugin Directory

The PluginDirectory.php is responsible for all file operations that are performed on plugins. It manages the plugin's directory, retrieving files and their contents.

Plugin Log

For a cleaner event log for the plugins, a new Log channel 'plugin' was introduced in the config/logging.php logging into the storage/logs/plugin.log file. This logger received a new utility class PluginLog to log all relevant events in the Plgin Lifecycle to that file. It supports all of laravels log levels which is based on the RFC 5424.

$plugin;
$pluginName = $plugin->name;

// Get logger directly by name:
new PluginLog($pluginName);
PluginLog::forName($pluginName);

// Get logger with plugin:
PluginLog::for($plugin);

// Messages can be chained directly:
PluginLog::for($plugin)->warning("This is a warning marked by the plugin name!")

//  Available Log Levels (* recommended)
//  emergency
//  alert
//  critical
//  error *
//  warning *
//  notice 
//  info *
//  debug

Caching

To improve performance and reduce database queries, the Services use a simple caching system, which is also used by Laravel (but unfortunately no utility class is exposed for that). The BootstrapCache writes a simple php file into bootstrap/cache/plugin/cache-name{-testing}.

Services may implement the BootstrapCache trait and define their own cache store. Those stores are appended by the -testing postfix, if they were created while testing to avoid invalid data. The PluginManager does rebuild all the caches at certain points in the plugin lifecycle.

This should improve the performance noticably, e.g. the PluginRoutes is checked on every request and with the Cache it just loads the php file (or reads it from memory) instead of creating a new connection to the database.

Available Services

For an overview of all available Services please visit the Feature Section.