Any thoughts on plugins?
I had a need for math. I ended up using a Tera filter to turn asciimath into mathml and a shortcode, which made me think that Tera filters could be a great spot for plugins. Where else could plugins fit? Are plugins a good idea?
The problem with plug-ins is that they would either be not very mighty or require a built-in scripting language. Assuming that @keats will never accept code which cannot be plugged right into the Zola binary, that limits our choices (which is a good thing, honestly).
My own SSG (which I won’t advertise here) uses the Duktape JavaScript engine for that, with a number of predefined hooks throughout the application. There are at least a few Rust Duktape wrappers, so it would be an option.
The more interesting question is which missing feature plug-ins would actually need to cover and whether that feature shouldn’t better be baked into Zola. And here I need to vote for the latter, I’m afraid - for security and performance reasons.
I was thinking maybe dynamic linking? Zola could load a dll that exports Tera filters for example. That would be powerful without needing to embed a scripting engine. I’m not sure what other places would be easy / useful to add hooks. Adding Tera filters is the only spot I can think of right now.
I admit that there’s probably not a huge user experience improvement between writing a dylib and just forking Zola so… it’s just a thought.
Then, maybe, this should rather be a Tera feature request.