How to create a standalone CiviCRM extension

[Coleman Watts]

All the advice I've heard for implementing hooks has been to write a custom Drupal module. But that's not very portable since it's tied to one CMS (and also one version of one CMS).

I'm wondering if there is a way to create a standalone CiviCRM extension that
- Works under Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress
- Implements CiviCRM hooks (and doesn't interfere with other hook implementations - I understand that Joomla only allows 1 instance of each hook)
- Can add civicrm pages and admin menu items (akin to Drupal's hook_menu) i.e. /civicrm/mypage?reset=1
- Can store its own settings in the CiviCRM db (preferably in the same place civi settings are kept)

[xavier]

Seems to recall something jammie tried when in the sprint in bourne. Ping him on IRC, I don't know the details of what he found (or didn't)

X+

[Kurund Jalmi]

colemanw,

If I am not wrong lobo already added some support for "civicrm modules", you might want to check with him on irc

Kurund

[Donald Lobo]

We experimented with this at the london sprint and determined it was feasible with the current extension system (i.e. we modified the extension system to allow a new type called module)

there are a few more things that remain to be done to make it complete:

1. Add a hook_civicrm_install and hook_civicrm_uninstall - so a module can install tables / add tables to the schema etc
2. Add API functions to the settings functionality. This came about in 4.1 (so pre-london) but would be nice to expose get/set via the API
3. We already expose a hook to add items to the menu table. We'll need to ensure we rebuild the menus when we do an install/uninstall

let me know if u want to work on this and we can get it going for 4.2. The event discount and giftaid module would be great candidates to make CMS agnostic

lobo

[Coleman Watts]

Good stuff. So is the "module" type extension currently implemented in 4.1? Is there any documentation on how to create one?
What is the naming convention for calling hooks from within an extension?
What about creating a page? (or is that the same as a menu item like it is in Drupal?)

[Coleman Watts]

Also, and probably most importantly, if people start writing modules for CiviCRM then we need a repository for them. It looks like someone made a start on this at http://directory.civicrm.org/ but it doesn't seem to be maintained and lacks basic things like issue tracking and version control. Any chance the website redesign is addressing this?

[Hershel]

It looks like someone made a start on this at http://directory.civicrm.org/ but it doesn't seem to be maintained

Yes, it hasn't been updated since CiviCRM 3.3 it appears. I was just thinking today that we need such a thing--perhaps just a wiki page....

[Donald Lobo]

What we have is a good start and we should build on that rather than a wiki page. A lot more dynamic and we can extend it based on our needs / requirements

Anyone want to take the lead on this?

lobo