AjaXplorer comes fully loaded with various plugins to ease the integration with other systems, help you develop your own specific installation, or even use AjaXplorer as a very generic explorer-like GUI, for browsing any type of data.
Plugins can be seen as « features ». They come packed with their own actions and parameters, and can drastically change the way AjaXplorer works. A plugin is composed of a folder « plugintype.pluginname » containing at least an XML file describing the plugin, the manifest.xml. When you want to customize, duplicate, understand a plugin, a good start is always to look at the manifest.xml. A plugin can come with various resources : PHP code, Javascript, images, internationalisation data, etc. All these are always declared in the manifest.xml.
Most plugin come directly from the core, and you don’t have anything to do to « install » them. If you have downloaded a plugin, then drop it inside the plugins folder of the application, and clear your cache (see below). There are a couple of plugins that must be activated via configuration files because they are necessary for the starting of the application : see the file conf/bootstrap_plugins.php. For all the other plugins, you have to check and activate them via the GUI, in the Settings section (accessible as administrator only).
Warning, since the gathering of all manifest.xml files into one huge XML registry is CPU intensive, there is a cache mechanism to avoid parsing these file at each request. This implies that when you make changes to a plugin, you’ll have to delete the two new cache files located in the data/cache folder : plugins_cache.ser and plugins_requires.ser. If you’re developing, you’ll want to disable this cache totally. This possible by setting the AJXP_SKIP_CACHE to « true » inside conf/bootstrap_context.php.
Since version 4, another way to automatically clear the cache is simply editing one of the plugins configuration accessible in the GUI via Settings > Plugins Options (for example disable/re-enable a plugin).
In this section, all the plugins available to extend AjaXplorer features are listed. Each plugin has its own forum thread embedded in the page, please use it to add any comment that could be helpfull for other users.
