TT PLUGIN_PATH

[jatill]

I have a homegrown plugin module for template toolkit that lives in /my/directory/My/Plugin.pm. What would I need to set the PLUGIN_PATH to in order to be able to [% USE My::Plugin %] in my templates? Also, if this pluging module does stuff that non-templates want to access too, would I be better off creating 2 modules (one with the subs, and 1 as a wrapper for the Plugin), or just call the subs directly from the Plugin module?

[Taulmarill]

a simple use lib qw(/my/directory); in your perl-script should do the trick.

--edit--
oh, yes, and your module has to be somewhere under Template::Plugin, otherwise TT2 is not recognizing it as a plugin. see the Documentation.

[matthewb]

You can include plugins you have defined yourself that are outside of @INC by specifying a relative (to the program that constructs a new Template object) path.

Supposing the following output of ls -R:

.:
Local  index.pl

./Local:
MyPlugin.pm

...where one might use the module Local/MyPlugin.pm with ``use Local::MyPlugin;'', an argument to the constructor of ``PLUGIN_BASE => 'Local','' would allow you to say ``[% USE MyPlugin %]''.

A trivial example (using the proposed directory structure) may be illustrated, thus:

Read more... (2 kB)

There's a book which explains all this very nicely, personally I found it easier-going than browsing the docs.

As for whether you should use your plugin-defining module elsewhere in your application, I can't see an obvious case where you'd want to use code that inherits from Template::Plugin::Base outside of the context of processing templates but, if you can, there's no particular reason you cannot. I would argue that it makes sense to keep your plugin logic packaged separately, if only to make its purpose obvious to a future maintainer.