XH 1.6: Integration of the Pluginloader to the Core

[cmb]

Hello Community,

while checking the roadmap to XH 1.6 I found that this topic hasn't an own thread--so I'd like to start it.

Due to historic reasons the pluginloader has always been separated from the core of CMSimple. Basically this gives some flexibility, as it possible to replace the pluginloader with another one, even a totally different one. But this flexibility has it's price: plugins working with pluginloader A would not work with pluginloader B and vice versa. If I'm not mistaken this was at least a minor issue years ago, when svarrer's pluginloader (version 1) and djot's pluginloader (version 2) co-existed. So having only 1 common pluginloader is probably best for both end-users as well as developers.

CMSimple_XH has integrated the pluginloader (a version based on djot's pluginloader) to the base distribution from the beginning. This was necessary, as XH delivered the meta_tags and page_params Plugins, which required a pluginloader and the new page_data feature. During the development of CMSimple_XH 1.0, CMSimple was still under development officially, so it was decided to keep as much of the new functionality as possible in the pluginloader, so the core could be replaced with a newer version of CMSimple later without the necessity to make too many changes. This was a very reasonable decision IMO. But soon after the final release of CMSimple_XH 1.0 Peter Harteg released CMSimple 3.3 and announced to discontinue the further development of CMSimple. This opened the possibility to restructure the code of CMSimple_XH in a reasonable way, but that was delayed to be able to concentrate on CMSimple_XH 2--but that version never came.

In CMSimple_XH 1.5 the separation of the pluginloader from the core was finally softened to be able to display the installed plugins in the admin menu. At least since then the pluginloader was no more decoupled from the core, so it can't be replaced with an arbitrary alternative. IMO the time has come to finally integrate the pluginloader to the core in XH 1.6.

I've already done that in in the 1.6cmb branch on SourceForge, which is available for testing and evaluation: http://cmsimpleforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=5318 (regarding details about the merging of the pluginloader to the core see the first list item). I'm quite convinced, that this or some other kind of integration would be a great improvement, enabling a cleanup of the core, so being able to enhance it in the future without having to cater for a separate pluginloader.

Christoph