This is the second blog post in a series of posts relating to building plugins for Umbraco v5 (Jupiter).

Related Posts:

1. Umbraco Jupiter Plugins – Part 1

Disclaimer

This post is about developing for Umbraco v5 (Jupiter) which at the time of this post is still under development. The technical details described below may change by the time Umbraco Jupiter is released. If you have feedback on the technical implementation details, please comment below.

Routing & URLs

As mentioned in the previous post Umbraco Jupiter will consist of many types of plugins, and of those plugins many of them exist as MVC Controllers.  Each controller has an Action which a URL is routed to, this means that each Controller plugin in Jupiter requires it’s own unique URLs. The good news is that you as a package developer need not worry about managing these URLs and routes, Jupiter will conveniently do all of this for you.

Packages & Areas

My previous post mentioned that a ‘Package’ in Jupiter is a collection of ‘Plugins’ and as it turns out, Plugins can’t really function unless they are part of a Package. In it’s simplest form, a Package in v5 is a folder which contains Plugins that exists in the ~/Plugins/Packages sub folder. The folder name of the package becomes very important because it is used in setting up the routes to  create the unique URLs which map to the MVC Controller plugins. Package developers should be aware that they should name their folder to something that is reasonably unique so it doesn’t overlap with other Package folder names. During package installation, Jupiter will check for uniqueness in Package folder names to ensure there is no overlap (there will be an entirely separate post on how to create deployment packages and how to install them).

Here’s a quick example: If I have a Package that contains a Tree plugin called TestTree (which is in fact an MVC Controller) and I’ve called my Package folder ‘Shazwazza’, which exists at ~/Plugins/Packages/Shazwazza then the URL to return the JSON for the tree is: http://localhost/Umbraco/Shazwazza/Trees/TestTree/Index 

Similarly, if I have a Editor plugin called TestEditor with an action called Edit, then a URL to render the Edit Action is:

http://localhost/Umbraco/Shazwazza/Editors/TestEditor/Edit

If you’ve worked with MVC, you’ll probably know what an MVC Area is. The way that Jupiter creates the routes for Packages/Plugins is by creating an MVC Area for each Package. This is how it deals with the probability that different Package developers may create MVC Controllers with the same name. MVC routes are generally based just on a Controller name and an Action name which wouldn’t really work for us because there’s bound to be overlap amongst Package developers, so by creating an Area for each Package the route becomes unique to a combination of Controller name, Action name and Area name.  MVC also determines where to look for Views based on Area name which solves another issue of multiple Packages installed with the same View names.

Whats next?

In the coming blog posts I’ll talk about

• how plugins are installed and loaded
• how and where the Views are stored that the plugins reference
• how to create all of the different types of plugins

Code Garden 2011

I’ll be doing a talk on Plugins for Umbraco Jupiter at Code Garden 2011 this year which will go in to a lot more detail than these blog posts. If you are attending Code Garden already, then hopefully this series will give you a head start on Umbraco v5. If you haven’t got your tickets to Code Garden yet, what are you waiting for?! We have so much information to share with you :)