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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Plugins!

My SaaS version of https://datasette.io is the open source version plus 76 plugins. Almost all of those plugins are themselves open source, with just a few that aren't for features that are unique to the SaaS product - things like showing how much disk space the user has used up already.

Here's what that custom plugin looks like, it's pretty thin: https://gist.github.com/simonw/114131fd9c1826f3629cc3b3dcb84...

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Same idea for my Saas, pretty much every aspect of the software can be changed through plugins. A build is mostly about assembling the right lego blocks like this https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/master/ser... and a plugin is just a piece of code implementing an interface like this one https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/master/ser... which enables various build to switch the search engine to virtually any backend

I think that should be https://datasette.io/

Thanks, fixed

Got an good pointers for writing pluggable code? How to make the app itself ready to get all these fancy plugins?

I pitched a conference talk about this recently, if it gets accepted I'll have a good excuse to write this up. It's surprisingly hard to find good information about!

You can get a good idea by reading docs about plugins APIs for a particular software.

WordPress is a pretty good example (and all the problems that entails if it gets out of hand). They use a hook/filter model to change outputs of various systems via plugins, and allow plugins to reimplment low-level functionality.

I recommend checking out their approach, as it is pretty flexible.

Another good example is CKAN, the most widely used open data portal platform. Their docs are pretty good on how to write plugins -- gives you an idea of how the architecture works.

https://docs.ckan.org/en/2.9/extensions/index.html

That's a very interesting approach! Thanks for sharing.

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