Reflections on Writing Workflow

One thing has made itself glaringly obvious over the last few weeks while I have been periodically working on my Workflow plugin: writing plugins of significant functionality for MT 3.1x is disturbingly easy.

While there are still some features I would like to see, namely more application level callbacks for me to hook my code into, getting Workflow to the planned level of functionality was actually so easy that I ended up adding additional features that were not part of the original feature list. I was expecting to spend most of my time with the plugin working out some fancy perl tricks to accomplish what I wanted (if you have looked at some of the perl acrobatics Jay employed in the "integration" of MT-Blacklist with older versions of MT, you will understand what I am talking about). Instead, the callback methods I wrote worked perfectly the first time, which meant that I could spend extra time on the configuration interface (and I think that extra time is reflected quite well, if I do say so myself).

I remember my first real plugin: MTSearches. I am nearly dumbfounded every time I think of what us plugin developers could write back then and what is possible now. It is a couple orders of magnitude beyond what it used to be. Here are some revealing numbers I have pulled together:

• MTSearches plugin
  • 130 lines of code
  • 6 template tags, using data culled from the activity log

• Workflow plugin portion (not including the configuration app)
  • 117 lines of code
  • 5 template tags, populated by custom information stored by the config. app
  • 2 links added to the MT web interface (for blogs and for entries)
  • 1 application level callback (preventing users from setting an entry to publish without permission)

And I think we are only scratching the surface of what a plugin can do. I look forward to seeing what the future holds.