Developing Discourse Plugins - Part 1 - Create a basic plugin

[AstonJ]

Just starting on my first small plugin I have a few questions I hope someone can help with…

@eviltrout

Update August 2018 , see Rails plugin generator to create a complete discourse plugin skeleton in your plugins directory

First question is does it matter if we use what’s in this guide or should we really be aiming to use the plugin generator?

@eviltrout

The plugin.rb file has two purposes: it is the manifest for your plugin with the required information about your plugin including: its name, contact information and a description. The second purpose is to initialize any ruby code necessary to run your plugin.

It wasn’t covered in this guide, but how can we make data available to our templates from the plugin.rb file?

Let’s say for example I want to display a random welcome message at the plugin-outlet topic-above-posts whenever somebody visits a topic, with the message being randomly selected from an array in plugin.rb… how would I send that data to the template? Which I also presume would go here:

plugins/my_new_plugin/assets/javascripts/discourse/templates/connectors/topic-above-posts/my_new_plugin.hbs (Is this correct?)

Any tips greatly appreciated