I recently ran a Mura CMS training seminar in London, UK and thought one of the exercises was valuable enough to share with the community in general, that of building a Mura CMS Plugin from scratch. I mentioned this to Sean at Blue River, and ended up doing a Mura Show on the topic, and thought it would be helpful to create a blog post as well. I highly recommend you view the Mura Show topic first, as it contains a great deal more content than this post.
I will be launching two new initiatives in the Mura CMS realm in 2011: training and online (video) documentation. The first training seminar is already scheduled (in London, England, March 7th-9th), and the first of the training videos should be available very soon.
Over the last few years I've devoted a lot of my development hours to building on top of the Mura CMS. During that time there has remained a bright and burning point of desire in the Mura community (and myself) for one key ingredient: Ecommerce. I've developed a couple of proprietary solutions, but never anything that was going to be flexible or configurable enough for general use. Until now, that is.
One of the first issues developers encounter when building a plugin for the Mura CMS is in finding a place to store data. It is possible to create a script for adding tables to the Mura site's datasource, or even generating the tables for a completely separate datasource, but often that is a level of complexity that just isn't needed or desired. There are other options, such as flat files or XML documents, but they have their own issues and aren't always scalable or search-friendly.
In part II of Advanced Plugin Development for the Mura CMS we looked at a basic FW/1 plugin framework that used SubSystems as display objects. In Part III we are going to discuss integrating a datasource and ColdSpring into your plugin. This datasource could be one that is completely separate from your Mura DSN, or it could involve custom tables within the Mura DSN itself.
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