Plugins

All the Claroline Connect features are injected through plugins.

Plugins are symfony bundles which implement a custom interface : Claroline\KernelBundle\Bundle\PluginBundleInterface.

There are 3 ways to create new plugins for Claroline Connect :

• Directly into the Claroline Connect package.
• By declaring a “Distribution” package (which can introduce multiple plugins at once).
• By declaring a “Plugin” package. Not supported yet

Plugins can inject :

• Resources (API + UI)
• Tools (API + UI)
• DataSources (API + UI)
• Account tabs (UI)
• Actions for the base entities (eg. User, Workspace, Resource)
• Header widgets (UI)

Declaring a new plugin

API

The bundle class [required]

Plugins are standard symfony bundles (aka class extending Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Bundle\Bundle) and follow the same naming standards.

In addition to the PluginBundleInterface, Claroline Connect declares some abstract classes (which inherit from Bundle) to ease the declaration of the Plugin bundle file.

The abstract class to implement depends on the way the plugin is provided to Claroline Connect.

• Main package plugin : Claroline\KernelBundle\Bundle\DistributionPluginBundle.
• Custom distribution plugin : Claroline\KernelBundle\Bundle\ExternalPluginBundle.
• Custom package plugin : Not supported yet

Like in standard symfony bundle, in most of the case, there is nothing to implement into the bundle class. It’s only used to declare the plugin to the base system, and all the required implementations are provided by the plugin abstract classes.

The plugin config file [required]

Plugins also require a config file (written in yaml) in order to inject new features (like resources and tools) into the Claroline Connect application. This file is located in your_plugin/Resources/config/config.yml.

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plugin: ~

and you must declare in bundles.ini file files/config/bundles.ini the plugin name and the bundle class name :

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Vendor\PluginNameBundle\VendorPluginNameBundle=true

The composer autoloader [required]

Claroline Connect uses a custom directory structure which don’t fully follow the PSR-4 rules (there are additional directories before the PSR-4 can be applied).

You’ll need to declare it to the composer autoloader in the composer.json file.

In Claroline Connect main package :

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"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "Vendor\\PluginNameBundle\\": "src/plugin/plugin-name"
    }
}

In external distribution :

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"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "Vendor\\PluginNameBundle\\": "plugin/plugin-name"
    }
}

Composer automatically updates its autoloader when running composer update or composer install.

When creating a new plugin, you’ll need to manually declare it to the composer autoloader :

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$ composer dump-autoload

UI

The plugin config file [required]

Plugins require a config file (written in js) in order to inject new elements (like resources and tools) into the Claroline Connect user interface. This file is located in MY_PLUGIN/Resources/modules/plugin.js.

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import {registry} from '#/main/app/plugins/registry'

registry.add('VendorPluginNameBundle', {
  tools: {
    // ...
  },
  resources: {
    // ...
  }
  // ... Other elements to inject into the UI
})