Re: [SM-PLUGINS] [SM-DEVEL] Welcome To New SM Developers

[Paul L. <pa...@sq...>]

Antoine, are you subscribed to the development list at least?

On 4/18/07, Antoine Delignat <an...@de...> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> Paul Lesniewski wrote :
> >  I'd like to introduce to the community some new SquirrelMail
> > developers who have joined us by way of Google's Summer of Code
> > program.  They will be working with us through the (Northern
> > hemisphere) summer to complete a couple projects, and after that, we
> > hope that they will be sticking around for good.  ;-)   Please join me
> > in welcoming them and please help us as we sort through all the ideas
> > for these projects and build the most useful set of requirements for
> > ultimate implementation.  We plan to have most all of our
> > conversations about these projects here on the development mailing
> > list (and some on the plugins mailing list as necessary), and as
> > always, all comers are welcome to our conversations.
> >
> >  Antoine Delignat-Lavaud is a Mathematics and Physics (oh, AND
> > Computer Science!) student from France.  Antoine is the one and only
> > author of phpWebmail, and after learning a lot from it, he should be
> > bringing some always-welcome security paranoia when working with Thijs
> > on a new configuration (and maybe help) system.
> >
> I guess I've got nothing more to add after such a concise and accurate
> introduction.
> So, before the end of the summer, I sincerly hope perl won't be among
> the requirement to configure squirrelmail anymore. Plus, we'll work with
> Zach on a nice GUI for you to do the job, and hopefully help you
> understand what all those configuration variables are for, including
> those for plugins (hint to the SM-plugins team, guys, we'll need your
> advice about how plugins could include additional configuration !).

A couple of thoughts (although again, this might be best discussed on
a thread related to the kickoff of your project): I think using an
interface like plugins already do use to add options widgets to any of
the main SM options pages is highly desirable.  Plugins should mostly
just hook into a pre-defined API so all they have to do is fill out
some information in the right format and let SM take care of the rest
(careful of limiting the possibility that a plugin may need to do more
than that, however).  Plugin authors will, of course, have to
specifically use that API as well as look for configuration setting
overrides probably placed in a file such as:
/path/to/squirrelmail/config/<plugin name>_config.php

> Not
> to worry, all those changes will be made after the implementation has
> been discussed here.
>
> Best Regards,
> Antoine