Frontend Plugins: The Basics

This section will describe the basics of the Frontend plugins. The main goal of this section is to give the reader an overview and basic understanding of what Frontend plugins are, how they work, and what they look like. The details are discussed later in this chapter.

Concepts

A Frontend plugin is a class or a function that runs as a part of the page content generation process. Typically, Frontend plugins produce some visible content, but they can also be silent and do other tasks.

The simplest possible Frontend plugin looks like this:

function user_myext_plugin() { return 'Hello world!'; }

To call such a plugin, use the following TypoScript:

includeLibs.myext_plugin = EXT:myext/user_myext_plugin.php
page.10 = USER
page.10.userFunc = user_myext_plugin

The first line includes the PHP file with a plugin code. The second line defines that the plugin type is USER. There are several types of plugins. USER is the most common and it means that the plugin's output is cached...