Question: If you want to create a plugin for Abell, what data and functions you would expect to be exported out of abell?

[saurabhdaware]

This is how Abell works (as of v0.2.x)

1. Get all the necessary data in programInfo variable (Reads the theme/[$slug]/index.abell, reads the abell.config.js, reads the directories in content/, prepares all the necessary variables)
   (Code: https://github.com/abelljs/abell/blob/master/src/content-generator.js#L89)
2. build(programInfo) is called which loops through all .abell files and calls generateHTMLFile(path, programInfo) when it's a normal .abell file and generateContentFile(path, programInfo) when its [$slug]/index.abell.

Possible plugins

• RSS Feed (Thanks @akash-joshi for the suggestion)
• PWA (Way to create manifest.json, service workers, etc)
• SiteMap Generator

I would love to know suggestions and feedback on how we can possibly make the plugin system.

[saurabhdaware]

So my first thought is to have plugins that look like this.
abell-rss-feed-plugin.js

function beforeBuild(programInfo) {
  // ... Nothing to do before build
}

function afterBuild(completeContent, programInfo) {
  const rssXML = getRssXMLFromContent(completeContent, programInfo);
  fs.writeFile('rss.xml', rssXML);
  return 
}

module.exports = {beforeBuild, afterBuild}

[saurabhdaware]

Implemented this in some amount at feat-plugins-system branch

The first parameter in afterBuild, completeContent is not really needed since most of the information is there in programInfo and additional information can be read from the built files.

[saurabhdaware]

afterBuild and beforeBuild functions are added in v0.3.0, Here's an example plugin: https://github.com/saurabhdaware/abell-sitemap-plugin

[saurabhdaware]

Idea for source plugins:

function beforeBuild(programInfo, {createContent}) {
  const meta = {
    title: 'Blog from source'
  }

  const content = `# This is head
  ## This is subtitle
  nice
  `

  createContent(content, meta)

This will make it easy to build source plugin and will also help to handle data in standard way rather than relying on plugins to handle that.

[saurabhdaware]

I think we have stable plugin system now. Any additional exports can be handled in separate issues.