Category Archives: Idno

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There are now many plugins for Known, a lot of them I’ve written, are available on Github.

Many people, myself included, like to install these plugins via a git submodule checkout – this simplifies deployment and makes updating installed plugins easier, however it can be problematic.

The problem is that either the repository contains the actual plugin in a subdirectory (e.g. my Github plugin is in the repo ‘KnownGithub‘, and the plugin is in a subdirectory ‘Github’), or if they don’t, the actual clone of the repository will default to an incompatible name (e.g. Known’s Facebook plugin is in a repo ‘facebook’, but the code wants it in a directory ‘Facebook’).

Both have their own issues, but both mean you can’t directly use them in a submodule git checkout (unless you use my symlink trick). It would be nice if you could use these repos directly, so I put together a patch (which has been accepted) that allows you to build your plugin repos in such a way that they can be used directly from a git clone.

Introducing the autoloader

The patch I submitted introduces the ability to provide a loader for your plugin in the root directory of your plugin repository. So, if your plugin is Foo in a directory inside your repository KnownFoo, you could create a special autoloader.php file in the root that will allow Known to load your plugin in the normal way, direct from a git clone into your IdnoPlugins directory.

To do this, create a file autoloader.php with the following code:

/**
 * Support loading of direct checkout.
 */
spl_autoload_register(function($class) {
        $class = str_replace('\\', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $class);

    $segments = explode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $class);
    $PLUGIN_NAME = $segments[1];

        $basedir = dirname(dirname(dirname(__FILE__))) . '/'; 
        $file = str_replace($PLUGIN_NAME, basename(dirname(__FILE__)) . "/$PLUGIN_NAME", $class);

    \Idno\Core\site()->plugins()->plugins[basename(dirname(__FILE__))] = \Idno\Core\site()->plugins()->plugins[$PLUGIN_NAME];
    unset(\Idno\Core\site()->plugins()->plugins[$PLUGIN_NAME]);

        if (file_exists($basedir . $file . '.php')) {
                include_once($basedir . $file . '.php');
        }

});

This code will automatically load your plugin classes from its “real name” subdirectory, and make it available to your plugin loader.

Have a look at my Github plugin for an example, have fun!

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HTML Sanitisation is pretty important where user input is concerned, not doing so can easily let your users do some pretty funky things to your site.

The latest versions of the Known engine support a hook to call a sanitisation plugin when outputting bodies of text. The hook is called automatically whenever autop is called, but you can call it yourself if you want to.

Anyway, it would be remiss of me if I didn’t implement something that listened to this hook, so here’s a Known html sanitiser powered by HTML Purifier.

Check out the plugin, install and activate it in the usual way. Enjoy!

» Visit the project on Github...

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A client asked me to poke around on App.net, a social networking and microblogging platform, which also serves as a reference implementation of their API.

Since the best way to understand an API is to start using it, and since I try my best to be a good Open Source citizen, I put together a basic stub of a Known plugin for it.

This plugin provides basic syndication support for status messages and long form posts, and serves as a useful starting point for more exciting integrations.

Anyway, have a play, comments and pull requests to the usual places!

» Visit the project on Github...