The Art Of Plugin Development

A presentation about plugin development in Craft CMS given at the DotAll conference in 2018.

Transcript

1. The Art Of
   Plugin Development
   Ben Croker
   @ben_pylo
   PutYourLightsOn
   

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4. Personal Home Page Tools
   

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6. CS101
   Travelling Salesman Problem:
   Given a set of cities and distances
   between every pair of cities, find
   the shortest possible route that
   visits every city exactly once and
   returns back to the starting point.
   

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7. PHP Hypertext Preprocessor
   

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8. “ElePHPant”
   

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10. Percentages of websites using various server-side programming languages
    20 %
    40 %
    60 %
    80 %
    100 %
    PHP ASP.NET Static Files Java Ruby ColdFusion JavaScript Perl Python
    0.2 %
    0.3 %
    0.5 %
    0.6 %
    0.6 %
    2.2 %
    2.3 %
    12.9 %
    83.5 %
    Source: W3Techs.com, September 2018
    

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11. Open source, object-oriented, web application framework.
    

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12. Application
    Management
    Content
    Framework
    Driven Platform
    System
    Module
    Plugin
    Web
    Data
    Plugin
    Module
    2
    

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13. The Reality
    “That’s not a bug, that’s a feature.”
    Features
    Testing
    Updates
    Bug Reports
    Troubleshooting
    Documentation
    

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14. Writing New Code Modifying Existing Code Understanding Code
    Source: “What Do Programmers Really Do Anyway?” by Peter Hallam
    

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15. Understanding Code
    

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16. There is no such thing as
    beautiful code.
    

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17. User Experience
    Driven Development
    The biggest challenge is understanding the problem
    that you are trying to solve.
    

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20. Possibility vs Feasibility
    A plugin should do one thing and do it well.
    

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21. Warp Time
    Don’t get distracted by the noise.
    

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22. Refactoring
    Restructuring your code for readability and
    reusability without changing its external behaviour.
    Technical Debt
    Maintainability
    Readability
    Reusability Complexity
    Bloat
    

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23. }
    }
    

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24. Documentation
    

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28. Specialisation
    

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29. do the
    demo
    

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30. Craft 3 plugin development
    videos have landed.
    Available today.
    

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31. In conclusion...
    

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32. Thank You
    Ben Croker
    @ben_pylo
    PutYourLightsOn
    

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33. Acknowledgements
    Pixel & Tonic – creators of Cra CMS
    JetBrains – makers of PhpStorm
    Alexander Makarov – core maintainer of Yii
    Ryan White – advice and guidance on presentation
    Ryan Irelan – training partner and founder of cra quest.io
    Simon Oberrauner – paragliding photos
    Vladimir Reznichenko – creator of Php Inspections and Yii2 Inspections
    Ondřej Mirtes – creator of PHPStan
    Philip Sharp – editor of afieldguidetoelephpants.net
    Programming Wisdom (@CodeWisdom) – inspirational quotes
    The entire Cra CMS community for their endless support and willingness to help each other out!
    

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