Plugin Architecture
 

A while back, when Omniweb was in its v5 public beta phase, a few of us were developing icon themes for Omniweb for Rick Roe's contest. Nothing seems to have come of that, but we did use a special plugin that allowed theme switching - I think it had a .owplugin extension.

So my questions are:

- Will this theme plugin ever see the light of day?
- How about adding a plugin architecture to Omniweb, that allows developers to add things like preference panes, or status bar notifications?

Unfortunately, now that Rick no longer works at Omni, the theme plugin has fallen by the wayside.

We have had our own plugin architecture for years (pre-OS X in fact). All the preferences in OW currently are in the Preferences.bundle which is a type of plugin.

We used to have some documentation about how the plugin architecture worked and how to write your own plugin--but sadly most of that is out of date at this point since a lot of the information was about writing plugins that are obsolete since the switch to WebKit.

Obviously, we load Safari-style webplugins as well as Netscape-style plugins already--for preference panels, we use the preference architecture from our open-source OmniAppKit framework so those are doable. Originally the status bar icons (like the lock for HTTPS, or the Cookie for sites that have "cookied" you) were supposed to be configurable like a toolbar, but I don't think they are currently--perhaps in a future release.