I’m so excited about all the activity around new plug-ins and themes. However, some of y’all have noticed that the behavior around plug-ins wasn’t really locked down enough before we rolled out these features. So I’ve been working on fixing that.
This week I’ll be updating Micro.blog with a few changes that I think will make developing and editing plug-ins (and overriding templates) more consistent. I want to document them here for plug-in developers to have a chance to chime in if they have any feedback:
- Plug-ins installed from the directory will no longer be editable. You don’t want to make changes only to have them erased when a new plug-in version is available.
- Plug-ins created from the New Plug-in button will still be editable. This is really for developing a plug-in. When the plug-in is working, I encourage you to register it in the plug-ins directory so that it’s easy to install.
- The order of processing themes and plug-ins will change slightly. Full theme plug-ins first, then any custom theme templates can override that, and then finally non-theme plug-ins can add their own templates.
- If someone wants to edit a template in a theme plug-in, they need to use a custom theme to override that template. They can pick a template from the plug-in, but Micro.blog will create a copy of it, not edit the plug-in version.
- If someone wants to edit a template in a smaller (non-theme) plug-in, there will no longer be a way to do that, because the plug-in will take precedence over a custom theme. They will need to copy the template and uninstall the plug-in.
Let me know if this makes sense! I know there are a lot of moving pieces. If this breaks anything you’re working on, especially let me know.
Thanks!