Welcome to the Cookbook

So, now that you've built everything, it should be ready to distribute (though we'd suggest you also distribute a few extras like a readme or SQL file).

Once a plugin has been installed in /app/plugins, you can access it at the URL /pluginname/controllername/action. In our pizza ordering plugin example, we'd access our PizzaOrdersController at /pizza/pizzaOrders.

Some final tips on working with plugins in your CakePHP applications:

• When you don't have a [Plugin]AppController and [Plugin]AppModel, you'll get missing Controller errors when trying to access a plugin controller.
• You can have a default controller with the name of your plugin. If you do that, you can access it via /[plugin]/action. For example, a plugin named 'users' with a controller named UsersController can be accessed at /users/add if there is no controller called AddController in your [plugin]/controllers folder.
• You can define your own layouts for plugins, inside app/plugins/[plugin]/views/layouts. Otherwise, plugins will use the layouts from the /app/views/layouts folder by default.
• You can do inter-plugin communication by using $this->requestAction('/plugin/controller/action'); in your controllers.
• If you use requestAction, make sure controller and model names are as unique as possible. Otherwise you might get PHP "redefined class ..." errors.