Enhancement of plugin administration

1 Description

To improve the usability of plugins I would like to suggest the following enhancements of the plugin administration:

1. It should be possible to upload plugins via browser as zipped archives if Customizing/ is writable for the web server.
2. A plugin is currently bound to a single plugin-slot. However, plugins realising complexer functionality should be able to hook into several slots (e.g. UserInterfaceHook, PersonalDesktopHook and EventHook) while being handled as a "unit" regarding istallation, update, activation, id, version, language file etc. This could probably be realised with a new "generic" plugin-slot and an extension of the plugin.php file with a definition of the hooks for which the plugin should be called.
3. It should be possible to uninstall a plugin. Plugins that support this should provide an according database cleanup script.
4. The execution order of plugins serving a special hook should be changeable in the administration. This would, for example allow to manage the order of menu entries added by plugins or to put the plugins allowing further GUI modification before one that retuns the final HTML code.
5. Some plugin hooks like the UI hook are called at several places in ILIAS (menu, desktop, tabs ...). It would be good to hava an auto-generated list of all avaliable hook calls. The list could be generated from PHPdoc like comments, giviing also a free description of the purpose and special conditions.

2 Additional Information

• Idea / Concept: Fred Neumann, Uni Erlangen
• Funding: Required
• Development: Feature is to be developed by tbd
• Testcases / tested by:

3 Discussion

JF 11 June 2012: We appreciate features 2-5. We think that making code directory (Customizing) writable for the web server would be an additional security risk, so we would not prefer to implement number 1.

4 Implementation

…