Hi all,

I was looking at Mark’s bug report at https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=26890, and it got me thinking about how we use Koha Plugins (amongst other things).

I think it would be interesting to let Koha plugins touch the $template object before $template->output is called. That would give Koha plugins a lot more power without having to hardcode in specific methods and such into Perl scripts. The Perl script could lookup Koha plugins using a hard-coded key (e.g. opac/opac-detail.pl or opac/opac-detail), and then it would be the job of the Koha plugin to take things from there.

As a related aside, at some point, I’m planning to replace “output_html_with_http_headers” and “output_with_http_headers” (as part of Bug 26845 probably), but I’m not quite there yet. I’m slowly in the process of building Mojolicious controllers to replace our CGI scripts, and I’m hoping to refactor some vital components of Koha so that our CGI scripts keep working, but the new Mojolicious controllers are able to re-use the same code and stay consistent.

Anyway, it’s just an idea. We could implement it in “output_html_with_http_headers”, or we could just implement it in some important scripts like opac-detail.pl. I don’t have any particular use-cases in mind (besides Mark’s).

Another idea would be to put more of the UI logic into Javascript and hook plugins in more dynamically with the Javascript at a per-page level (rather than only via IntranetUserJS and OpacUserJS), but I haven’t thought too much about that.

David Cook

Software Engineer

Prosentient Systems

72/330 Wattle St

Ultimo, NSW 2007

Australia

Office: 02 9212 0899

Online: 02 8005 0595