[v2] Custom field plus plugin?

mhulse:

What will your plugin do? How do you see it fitting in with data coming from a channel?

-greg

Mhulse - I’m doing something similar with my Flickr for EE2 add-on. The add-on consists of a custom fieldtype and a plugin. I use the custom fieldtype’s settings panel to get the user’s Flickr API key and some other needed settings. The custom field creates a Flickr fieldtype which lets you browse your Flickr photos, select a photo and display it within an entry.

The plugin provides some more general template tags (to display your photostream, favorites, etc) but it uses the settings from the custom field’s settings panel. To do this I initialize the EE_Fieldtype class within my plugin class, then drill down through the EE_Fieldtype object to retrieve the needed settings from my fieldtype.

$fieldtype_class  = new EE_Fieldtype();
     $fieldtype_settings = $fieldtype_class->EE->config->EE->api_channel_fields->field_types['YOUR_FIELD_TYPE']->settings;

I’d be interested in hearing from some more experienced EE developers their thoughts on this. Is there a more preferred way to go about this. I thought about using a module/fieldtype combo instead of the plugin/fieldtype.

-Brett

Ok, scratch my previous post. That’ll only (sometimes) work if the user had already created a custom field. I had to redo my own custom field to correct for this. Here’s how I’m doing it now:

$this->EE =& get_instance();
        
$this->EE->load->library('api/api_channel_fields'); 
        
$fieldtype_settings = $this->EE->api_channel_fields->get_global_settings('[YOUR_FIELDTYPE_NAME]');

That should return an array of your fieldtype’s global settings.