One of the best parts of having such a quickly growing and enthusiastic group of developers on a project is that it the excitement really does feed off itself.
The last release or two I've mostly been planning the new Padre::Plugin API.
After finally gotten to something I liked and sketched up the POD and method stubs for the base plugin class (without actually implementing anything of note) I checked it in and went to bed.
I arrived back in IRC the next day to find that Gabor had already ported practically the entire plugin manager code over to the new API, and Steffen had already added PAR support to the new plugin manager as well.
Another day or two and pretty much all the plugins (granted, most of which were produced by the super-productive Fayland) have been ported over to the new API as well.
As with anything moving at this speed, it's all still a little rough, but with the implementation already in place, it's quite simple to just go in and shuffle a few minor things around so they work in the way I the Plugin API was meant to work.
So with the core plugin API now in place (to support upgrading, enable/disable and so on) we can start to turn to additional integration points between the plugin and the core.
The first two new integration points will be for document types (to identify a plugin as providing a document class for a particular mime-type) and then to provide an option to populate the "File -> New..." menu so that plugins can be written that do generation of new files and projects.
This is a big deal for me for two reasons. Firstly, because we can finally move non-Perl document support out of the core (which should help simply maintenance and clarify interfaces enormously) and secondly because I can start adding code to me personal plugin for generating the SPECIFIC skeletons that I use for my own code.
