Basic Help for plugin development

[davew]

Hi,

I'm writing a plugin (based on the PayPal plugin) for Bean Stream's hosted pay form. I seem to have everything working except the processing is kicking out a text line saying that the result is Unpaid. We are running Open Conference Systems 2.3.3.1, and I have a couple questions:

1. How can I do a simple debug output to figure out where in the process flow of my plugin the issue is occurring. Obviously a simple echo does not work. Is there a a simple method for finding where in the application flow things are failing?

2. When I install the plugin with the tar.gz it asks for a version.xml or rather a Version.xml, I have included one but to no avail. What should the directory structure of a plugin look like? What files are mandatory? Is there documentation on this somewhere?

3. How can I tell what standards are for what versions of OCS? I see a number of notes about plugins being built against older versions, and so I'm having trouble figuring out what code I can use as a guide.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Dave W

[mcrider]

Hi Dave,

1. How can I do a simple debug output to figure out where in the process flow of my plugin the issue is occurring. Obviously a simple echo does not work. Is there a a simple method for finding where in the application flow things are failing?

Why won't an echo work? You could also try writing data to your PHP log. And though the learning curve is a bit steep, I highly recommend using Eclipse to step through your code--Once you get used to it, its much more efficient than putting echo's throughout your code. Also, if your plugin is submitting anything via AJAX, or you're posting to a remote server, you'll want to use FireBug or something similar to inspect server responses.

2. When I install the plugin with the tar.gz it asks for a version.xml or rather a Version.xml, I have included one but to no avail. What should the directory structure of a plugin look like? What files are mandatory? Is there documentation on this somewhere?

All the files should be in the root folder, along with the version.xml file. There is an example of a dummy plugin here.

3. How can I tell what standards are for what versions of OCS? I see a number of notes about plugins being built against older versions, and so I'm having trouble figuring out what code I can use as a guide.

There isn't really concise documentation on these types of changes--Your best bet is to compare plugins in post and pre-2.3 version of OCS. Many plugins that were written before OCS 2.3 only have some surface changes e.g. in the function names.

Cheers,
Matt

[davew]

Why won't an echo work? You could also try writing data to your PHP log. And though the learning curve is a bit steep, I highly recommend using Eclipse to step through your code--Once you get used to it, its much more efficient than putting echo's throughout your code. Also, if your plugin is submitting anything via AJAX, or you're posting to a remote server, you'll want to use FireBug or something similar to inspect server responses.

Echo did not seem to work, I figured it was the templating, maybe we are not even getting into the function where I put them. I use eclipse for development, but I have just come in to help on this project so it's not setup with a debugger or anything. How do I set where the application logs to? I could not see a setting. And do you have some quick syntax for that?


Thanks

Dave

[mcrider]

Hi Dave,

If you're in a template, echo won't work.. You can echo (or var_dump) in the php file that calls the template, and that should spit the value out at the top of the page, but if you want to display a variable in a template, you'll just print it like html, e.g. <h1>{$someVariable}</h1>. If you want to print to the log, and again this has to be in a php file and not a .tpl file, you can just call error_log($variable) and it should print to your standard php log.

Cheers,
Matt