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TWikiPlugins 32 - 2007-01-06 - Main.TWikiContributor
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TWiki Plugins | | |
TWiki Plugins are developed and contributed by interested members of the community. Plugins are provided on an 'as is' basis; they are not a part of TWiki, but are independently developed and maintained. | |
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< |  Tip: TWiki:TWiki.TWikiPluginsSupplement on TWiki.org has supplemental documentation on TWiki Plugins. | >
> | Relevant links on TWiki.org:
See other types of extensions: TWikiAddOns, TWikiContribs, TWikiSkins | | |
Installing Plugins | | |
The performance of the system depends to some extent on the number of Plugins installed and on the Plugin implementation. Some Plugins impose no measurable performance decrease, some do. For example, a Plugin might use many Perl libraries that need to be initialized with each page view (unless you run mod_perl). You can only really tell the performance impact by installing the Plugin and by measuring the performance with and without the new Plugin. Use the TWiki:Plugins.PluginBenchmarkAddOn, or test manually with the Apache ab utility. Example on Unix:
time wget -qO /dev/null /bin/view/TWiki/AbcPlugin | |
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< | If you need to install an "expensive" Plugin, and you need its functionality only in one web, you can place the Plugin topic into that web. TWiki will initialize the Plugin only if the Plugin topic is found (which won't be the case for other webs.) | >
> | If you need to install an "expensive" Plugin, but you only need its functionality only in a subset of your data, you can disable it elsewhere by defining the %DISABLEDPLUGINS% TWiki variable.
Define DISABLEDPLUGINS to be a comma-separated list of names of plugins to disable. Define it in Main.TWikiPreferences to disable those plugins everywhere, in the WebPreferences topic to disable them in an individual web, or in a topic to disable them in that topic. For example,
* Set DISABLEDPLUGINS = SpreadSheetPlugin, EditTablePlugin
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Managing Installed Plugins | | |
Plugin-Specific Settings | |
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< | Plugin-specific settings are done in individual Plugin topics. Two settings are standard for each Plugin:
- One line description, used to form the bullets describing the Plugins in the TextFormattingRules topic:
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Set SHORTDESCRIPTION = Create dynamic foo bar reports
- Debug Plugin, output can be seen in
data/debug.txt. Set to 0=off or 1=on:
- The settings can be retrieved as Preferences variables like
%<pluginname>_<var>%. For example, %DEFAULTPLUGIN_SHORTDESCRIPTION% shows the description of the DefaultPlugin.
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> | Plugins are usually configured by variables accessible though the configure interface, but in some cases (usually older plugins) TWiki preferences are used. If a TWiki variable is defined in a Plugin topic e.g:
- Set SETTING = Create dynamic foo bar reports
Then these settings can be retrieved as preferences variables like %<pluginname>_<var>%. For example, %RUBBERPLUGIN_SETTING% shows the value of SETTING in the RubberPlugin topic. | | |
Listing Active Plugins | | |
Web Accessible Data | |
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< | Topic-specific data such as generated images can be stored in the topics attachment area, which is web accessible. Use the TWiki::Func::saveAttachment() function to store the data. | >
> | Topic-specific data such as generated images can be stored in the topic's attachment area, which is web accessible. Use the TWiki::Func::saveAttachment() function to store the data. | | |
Recommendation for file name:
- Prefix the filename with an underscore (the leading underscore avoids a nameclash with files attached to the same topic)
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 Copyright © by the contributing authors. All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors. Ideas, requests, problems regarding TWiki? Send feedback Note: Please contribute updates to this topic on TWiki.org at TWiki:TWiki.TWikiPlugins
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