Better Plugins: Hooks

[parkr]

One of the sticking points for plugins is all the monkey-patching craziness necessary to do even the simplest of actions.

One idea I'd like to toss around is this idea of hooks. In a similar manner to rails, it would be easy to call methods before and after various actions. I'd propose the following:

• Site
  • before_process
  • after_process
  • before_read
  • after_read
  • before_write
  • after_write
• Post/Page
  • before_render
  • after_render
  • before_write
  • after_write

What is the general consensus around hooks?

//cc @mattr- @benbalter @qrush @mojombo

[benbalter]

🆒 Great idea. I'm all sorts of for this.

[mattr-]

🆒 👍 🎉

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 7:29 AM, Ben Balter notifications@github.comwrote:

[image: 🆒] Great idea. I'm all sorts of for this.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/1414#issuecomment-22489627
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[kevinSuttle]

Like post-receive hooks? That's a great idea!

[parkr]

Conceptually, yes! Upon running Jekyll with plugins, plugins could specify a block or something to execute right before or after something happens.

[kevinSuttle]

Where would those live ideally? At some API endpoint?

[parkr]

It'd besomething like Jekyll::Post.after_render and you'd provide a block or class that is executed. Or after_render would be an array so you could control the order.

[0xcaff]

+1

[troyswanson]

I think the only thing that's worrisome here is the order in which the plugins are allowed access to the content.

We've had this trouble with other CMSs: plugin 🅱️ screws up something plugin 🅰️ changed. If people are judicious in their use of plugins and they limit their scope, this wouldn't be much of a problem and collision would be minimal. In practice, it might cause headaches for some.

All of that said, we should totally still do this, since it offers a very elegant approach to content manipulation.

[bitboxer]

The order is problematic, yes, but it's way better than the problems with the plugin order in the current monkey patching approach.

[troyswanson]

Damn straight. 👍

[parkr]

In the works, closing this.