Up to date plugin development docs and examples
Hi!
As part of migrating a forum I'm trying to write a custom plugin to supply some of my community custom functionality.
However the current development documentation status is... confusing to say the least
https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/147-developers-overview
this is incomplete, often telling you to go and lookup things in articles that doesn't seem to exist anymore. my next step was trying to figure the way to go by checking existing plugins, but all the plugins I've been able to find are written in what seems to be an old style. leaving me with more questions than answers :(
am I missing something? is there a more up to date place to look for docs?
Vanilla fills almost all the needs of my community, and the coding patterns as far as I've seen are really nice and intuitive. but we need to develop additional functionality and without docs it is so uphill we may not have the dev hours to migrate successfully 😥
Comments
I think you found almost all that you can find. But I also would say that you can learn from code. There is not only the Vanilla repo with some plugins included, but there is also a repo with plugins that are not shipped with Vanilla. Looking at those will give you a lot of practical examples.
Beyond that, you have got this community 😉 If you ask for support, an example or suggestions, you might not only get an answer but maybe even code snippets.
It appears they've moved the developer docs into an internal KB system. I don't believe there is any way for the community to contribute to or edit those docs now (previously they were on GitHub), which bodes poorly for the likelihood of a petition here remedying that.
Thanks, I did look at that repo, but most of the plugins there are developed in a totally different style than what I've seen in the docs. at least all the routing parts.
by looking at this post https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/37870/2020-oss-roadmap-plans, I see there are plans to rework this docs. so I'm not sure what would be the current way to handle routes. I don't really have a problem
OTOH
There may be good reasons for a move like that, but not having docs per version, and not letting the community contribute to such things is not encouraging. feels like OS community is an afterthought. I also made a simple PR to add a feature to vanilla porter about a month ago, and no one even cared to leave a comment on it. all in all, it's kind of disappointing.
Anyway, I'm almost ranting. I'll try to create topics for each question regarding development I have, and hopefully be able to make this work