If you like to load more than one bootstrap file for a plugin. You can specify an array of files for the bootstrap configuration key:

CakePlugin::loadAll(array(
    'Blog' => array(
        'bootstrap' => array(
            'config1',
            'config2'
        )
    )
));

You can also specify a callable function that needs to be called when the plugin has been loaded:

function aCallableFunction($pluginName, $config) {

}

CakePlugin::loadAll(array(
    'Blog' => array(
        'bootstrap' => 'aCallableFunction'
    )
));

Using a Plugin

You can reference a plugin’s controllers, models, components, behaviors, and helpers by prefixing the name of the plugin before the class name.

For example, say you wanted to use the ContactManager plugin’s ContactInfoHelper to output some pretty contact information in one of your views. In your controller, your $helpers array could look like this:

public $helpers = array('ContactManager.ContactInfo');

You would then be able to access the ContactInfoHelper just like any other helper in your view, such as:

echo $this->ContactInfo->address($contact);

Creating Your Own Plugins

As a working example, let’s begin to create the ContactManager plugin referenced above. To start out, we’ll set up our plugin’s basic directory structure. It should look like this:

/app
    /Plugin
        /ContactManager
            /Controller
                /Component
            /Model
                /Behavior
            /View
                /Helper
                /Layouts

Note the name of the plugin folder, ‘ContactManager‘. It is important that this folder has the same name as the plugin.

Inside the plugin folder, you’ll notice it looks a lot like a CakePHP application, and that’s basically what it is. You don’t actually have to include any of those folders if you do not use them. Some plugins might only define a Component and a Behavior, and in that case they can completely omit the ‘View’ directory.

A plugin can also have basically any of the other directories that your application can, such as Config, Console, Lib, webroot, etc.

Note

If you want to be able to access your plugin with a URL, defining an AppController and AppModel for the plugin is required. These two special classes are named after the plugin, and extend the parent application’s AppController and AppModel. Here’s what they should look like for our ContactManager example:

// /app/Plugin/ContactManager/Controller/ContactManagerAppController.php:
class ContactManagerAppController extends AppController {
}

// /app/Plugin/ContactManager/Model/ContactManagerAppModel.php:
class ContactManagerAppModel extends AppModel {
}

If you forgot to define these special classes, CakePHP will hand you “Missing Controller” errors until you’ve done so.

Please note that the process of creating plugins can be greatly simplified by using the Cake shell.

In order to bake a plugin please use the following command:

user@host$ cake bake plugin ContactManager

Now you can bake using the same conventions which apply to the rest of your app. For example - baking controllers:

user@host$ cake bake controller Contacts --plugin ContactManager

Please refer to the chapter Code Generation with Bake if you have any problems with using the command line.

Plugin Controllers

Controllers for our ContactManager plugin will be stored in /app/Plugin/ContactManager/Controller/. Since the main thing we’ll be doing is managing contacts, we’ll need a ContactsController for this plugin.

So, we place our new ContactsController in /app/Plugin/ContactManager/Controller and it looks like so:

// app/Plugin/ContactManager/Controller/ContactsController.php
class ContactsController extends ContactManagerAppController {
    public $uses = array('ContactManager.Contact');

    public function index() {
        //...
    }
}