Creating Plugins -- I'm new to it.

[Alan Vende]

Hello!

I'm a coder and I wanted to start creating Plugins for my various forums as well as maybe for others, if I get good enough. I haven't coded in a while though with JavaScript and such of that nature, though.

I was wondering what coding languages that you have to use in order to create a plugin, if any, and how "advanced" it has to get. Do you have to know the language well, fluently, to be albe to create a plugin?

Is there some things that you can't do with Plugins? Or can you do anything that you want if you know the coding to do it?

Thank you in advance for your help!

[David Clark]

Hi Alan Vende,

Here's another answer from a support admin to a similar question.

Plugins use JavaScript, but you can also use JQuery since all ProBoards forums have that library installed by default.

There are some plugins that are many thousands of lines of code long, but then there are very basic plugins who only serve to change a bit of text or allow you to remove a certain element. It's up to you how complex you want to make yours, since it's just JavaScript (with some cool additional capabilities, such as saving data to ProBoards' servers so the plugin can use it later).

There are some rules to plugin creation, and you can read those here.

My advice for getting starting would be to watch Jordan's videos here where he shows the basics of making a plugin. From there, I would download any plugins that are open-source (like any of the plugins from Brian, a support admin of ours) and then import them on to your forum to play around with them and look over the code.

[Alan Vende]

David Clark,

Thank you for getting back to me so quickly with what you did. I will look them over, but how would I be able to download a plugin and view the key and such?

Would you recommend I create a whole new forum to do this in or to use the forum that I would like to create Plugins for? (Some will go to the Library if they're good enough.

[David Clark]

Some people have test forums where they work on plugins (just to have a clean slate), but it's not required.

If you're downloading plugins from the plugin library (Admin > Plugins > Plugin Library) there will be a button to install them directly to your forum. From there, you can see if you have access to the plugins code by seeing if it's listed in the Build tab (Admin > Plugins > Build).

If you're downloading a plugin from a non-library source like Brian's website that I linked above, you'll be downloading a .pbp file to your computer. Via that route, you can import it onto your forum by following the instructions outlined here.

[Alan Vende]

Thank you so much for the help!

[David Clark]

Not a problem

[Alan Vende]

Is it wrong to ask for coding advice/help if you've never created a Plugin before? I've been wondering for the past few hours if I should ask for help on here with the Plugins I want to create.

Sorry if that's not okay; I'm just wondering if it is or not.

[Chris]

This would indeed be the board to ask your questions Alan Vende since it is dedicated to the subject of plugin development. The more people we have writing plugins means a greater selection from which to choose
One thing to note since this is a misconception that I've seen with quite a few new plugin developers is the idea that a plugin can directly access and manipulate the forum data stored on the server which is not true with Proboards. That data remains protected and in some cases can be read but never directly modified through a plugin. Except for some template pre-processing your plugin will be running in the browser environment and not as some process on the server. The separation of church and state is well defined in this corner of the internet.

[Alan Vende]

Chris: Thank you for that, my friend. May I either PM you with my ideas and we could talk about the coding that needs to be in it (because I would love to learn from an experienced ProBoards coder), but at the same time I would like to learn more so I don't have to ask so many questions.

I also don't want to have everyone's Participated area to be flooded with our conversations about Plugins and what works and what doesn't; I've had that happen on a Facebook group I was on and I had to leave because it got too much; I couldn't see what my actual friends were posting.

Thank you again, my friend; that helped a lot. I just don't want to get booted for doing something with a Plugin by accident that I didn't know I did (considering I only know just about the following codes:

<a href="#link">Link Text</a>
<a name="link">Link Text</a>
<a href="Web Link">Link Text</a>

That's about all I memorized.

[Chris]

Oct 24, 2014 10:36:37 GMT -8 Alan Vende said:

Chris: Thank you for that, my friend. May I either PM you with my ideas and we could talk about the coding that needs to be in it (because I would love to learn from an experienced ProBoards coder), but at the same time I would like to learn more so I don't have to ask so many questions.

I also don't want to have everyone's Participated area to be flooded with our conversations about Plugins and what works and what doesn't; I've had that happen on a Facebook group I was on and I had to leave because it got too much; I couldn't see what my actual friends were posting.

Thank you again, my friend; that helped a lot. I just don't want to get booted for doing something with a Plugin by accident that I didn't know I did (considering I only know just about the following codes:

<a href="#link">Link Text</a>
<a name="link">Link Text</a>
<a href="Web Link">Link Text</a>

That's about all I memorized.

I would prefer that such conversations remain in thread Alan Vende so anyone with similar questions can benefit from a publicly viewable discussion. Others can also add relevant information or correct any errors leading to a richer and much more accurate discussion thus benefiting the entire community.

The Proboards notification system offers safeguards that can be used by anyone to prevent being overwhelmed (e.g. delay further notices in participated dialog through actions menu) so I don't think that would be a problem as you have described. If the discussion involves sensitive material then by all means feel free to go to PMs but questions regarding HOW-TOs should remain public.

The examples you've posted appear to be HTML which is the underlying structure of any webpage but keep in mind that to write plugins that do something other than place something on the page (which any admin can do from their own admin panel) you also need to know Javascript as David mentioned, and Javascript was originally created for the sole purpose of manipulating HTML. To learn Javascript you might want to try the Javascript tutorial at Codecademy.com

[Alan Vende]

I understand that completely; I just wanted to ask in case you wanted to have it there so no one would get overwhelmed with so many notifications.

I've tried JavaScript once before, and it's never worked for me. I know a lot of HTML, but JavaScript and CSS is an area where I still need to learn.

Thank you for that; I will look at that link.

[Gator]

I would like to learn more about making plugins to..going to look at the url to and thanks for this thread.