Plugin Visibility

One weakness of Manila is that an installed plugin is visible to all websites on the server. This can be a problem where a plugin offers features judged too powerful or inappropriate for some websites by the server administrator; or if the use of the plugins should be restricted because the hosting site policy is to charge for value added plugins.

With a very simple change to Manila itself, plugin developers can make their plugins controllably visible to individual Manila websites. The change affects what plugins are displayed on the editors only menu Prefs->plugins page. If a plugin isn't displayed it cannot be enabled. A table in config.manilaplugin contains a sub-table for each plugin, which contains a flag for website which is permitted to use a plugin.

bayly.root contains a controlpanel addin which allows setting and interrogating these flags.

The change required of the plugin developer is very small, see #security Scripts.

There is a table called pluginskeleton in bayly.root which contains a fully functional, if minimal, Manila plugin that illustrates this change.