Moving Core into Plugins

To further simplify the core of the I-Metrics CMS one of our objectives is to move parts of the existing functionality into the Plugins. Certain features for example the comments currently bind to the text pages can become optional.

A Plugin for the comments scripts can be created and optionally be installed and not only be part of the text pages but can also automatically associated with the various content collections. If you are familiar with the votes system you can understand this approach as the comments functionality becomes more modular and at the same time expands covering different pages with more configuration options.

Configuration settings for Plugins are stored with the plugin entry. This reduces the database requirements, sql queries and global space because the configuration is loaded automatically if the plugin is installed and it is activated for a given set of passed parameters that can be handled on the front or back end. Another advantage is the loading content overhead. Even when the output did not display comments for a text page the older code was still including the associated files.

The plugin concept normalizes this behavior as the comments functionality can be enabled or disabled in the global scope of the I-Metrics CMS, or exclusively for collections and pages. It can also be enabled for individual web pages. This approach increases the flexibility of the framework, furthermore increases the different types of websites this CMS can be applied and integrated.