Grav - Plugin Basics

In this chapter, we will understand how a plugin works as an additional functionality in Grav. Plugin is a piece of software that provides additional functionality which was not originally completed by Grav's core functionality.

Grav Plugin can be uploaded to expand the functionality of the site. Plugins are used to make your work easier. The Dependency Injection Container helps access the key objects in Grav. In the entire life cycle with the help of Grav's event hooks, we can manipulate Grav as per our need and can also access whatever the Grav knows. We will study in detail about the Grav event hooks in the Chapter Grav - Event Hooks.

Dependency Injection is a software design pattern in which components are given their dependencies instead of hard coding them within the component.

There are many free plugins available for Grav which are used for displaying blog archive, sitemap, search engine, form, light slider and many more. You can download the plugins from here. In the Plugin folder, you can store the plugins with a unique name; the name should be related to the function of the plugin and it should not contain any capital letter, underscore or space. We will study about how to use plugin in the Chapter Grav - Plugin Tutorials .

Powerful

Plugins are easy to write, flexible and powerful. There are 46 plugins, and have the features that include displaying a sitemap, provides breadcrumbs, display blog archives etc.

Essentials

When Grav is installed on your system, you can see there are two plugins inside the <your_folder_name>/user/plugins folder.

• Error plugin

• Problem plugin

Error Plugin − It is used to display the HTTP errors i.e. 404 Page Not Found when there is no request page available for the given URI.

Problem Plugin − It is used for detecting issues regarding the permissions, hosting setup and missing folders. It is useful when you install new Grav for identifying such issues.