New Google Analytics Plugin

Thanks to Grant Copley for inspiring this update. He published a Google Analytics plugin for the ColdFusion on Wheels framework and announced it on the Wheels google group. I noticed as I was looking at his description of the plugin that as plugins go, it doesn't do a whole lot. It just outputs the javascript for Google Analytics. And it got me thinking actually that it was a perfect candidate for the onTap framework, precisely because it does so little.

The reason I say this is a perfect candidate is because until now there hadn't been a complete, simplified example of a plugin installer. There have been plugins certainly. There's the DataFaucet plugin and the Members onTap plugin and now there's a CacheBox plugin, but all of those plugins are whole frameworks in their own right. That's been a problem because although the plugin system is documented, there wasn't a complete example of a plugin that you could use as a point of reference for what a plugin should look like. You had to guess about whether or not you were reading the documentation correctly. And looking at the DataFaucet plugin or the Members onTap plugin might not have been terribly helpful, because both of those are larger systems with relatively sophisticated installers, so it would have been easy to get lost in the code and have difficulty separating the installer from the application as you're looking at it. So by creating a plugin from something that arguably doesn't actually need a plugin, I've been able to provide a complete, simplified example that shows you just how to write an installer and nothing much else. ;)

Rather than publishing it separately, I've included it in the Plugin Manager project, which is now part of the core framework download. I also made a few very minor changes to the Plugin Manager itself - I don't think you'll notice any functional differences. But if you just want to see the plugin example, I'm attaching the zip archive of the Google Analytics plugin to this blog as well. Look for the download link in the stats below this entry.