After the plethora of commits and rush of features into the 0.42 Birthday Edition of Padre, the brief lull afterwards has given me the chance to do some refactoring in less exciting areas.
One of these areas is in the Plugin Manager, which currently has two interpretations of a "Plugin Name" (The one that the plugin tells us to call it, and the wrong one) :)
So I've spent quite a few hours last night digging all the remnants of those old names out (which were used everywhere, and deeply integrated) and just sticking to the class name for the plugin primary internal identifier.
One benefit of this is that the Plugin system can now (theoretically) support plugins outside the Padre::Plugin::FooBar flat namespace (although they won't be auto-detected and there's no way to tell the plugin manager to add it yet).
A secondary benefit of this is that I can now add auto-detection for plugins in the long-awaited Acme::Padre::FooBar namespace.
Padre is started to accumulate enough subsystems now that the idea of doing joke plugins is getting quite realistic.
For example, the SVN-only plugin Padre::Plugin::Media shows a proof of concept for making the editor asynchronously play sound. This Media code, combined with Hook::LexWrap and a File::ShareDir collection of wav files, would make it pretty easy to inject sound effects into arbitrary editor events.
Imagine a Simpsons or South Park themed editor! Or for something less copyright-breaky, perhaps something more like a Acme::Padre::TheCollectedSayingsOfRicardoSignes, with witty and biting interjections whenever the plugins spots you doing something rjbs doesn't like :)
"Oh god, you're using MIME-Tools. Just kill yourself now!"
"You're using SVN? Switch to Git you fool!"
"Oh good, you're not connected to the internet. We need to talk..."
The new Acme:: detection will is available in SVN now, and in the next 0.43 release on the CPAN.
