This is preliminary and just ideas for brainstorming. The ability to create reusable handlers,layouts/views and simple configs for extending applications. This would give the developer the ability to package their application or sub-set of applications into one single archive (zip). This way a developer can distribute this archive and a user can place it on a special directory on their application called extensions or archives and the dashboard or the developer will unzip the archive here. On app startup, the framework will read the extensions and register their events and location. The special config file here, could declare some URL matching filter to trigger the events, or just trigger the events according to extension name.
For example, the extension folder can be called: blog
Which has a handlers directory, layouts, views, etc. The framework will register this extensions' handlers for execution.
Then when I pass the event: blog.entries.dspAll The framework will recognize the extension package name blog and then look for the entries handler and execute the dspAll method.
The framework detects this extension point and presents the layouts and views used here. In order to also connect to the parent, there could be be extra logic here, to actually set views to render from the parent. The only things that could be available to these extensions could be views/layouts. However, the whole point of the extensions is for them to be agnostic of their environment. The scopes are all in the same scope, so single sign-on and application,session scopes can be shared.
This idea could promote more community involvement in creating coldbox extensions. It is also a great place to connect to via the Dashboard Application. This way, I can generate an application and actually query the community db and download extensions for my new app. RAD to the MAX.
