I’ve recently become a member of LinkLift and they asked me to add a bit of PHP to my blog in order to plug into their system. LinkLift have a plugin for WordPress and a whole host of other blogs, but not one for B2evolution.

There is a FreeHTML plugin that allows you to inject custom HTML, but couldn’t find a plugin to allow me to inject PHP code. I found a lot of people in the forums asking for one, but there is quite a lot of opposition to it.

The people who want a FreePHP plugin have not thought about the security implications of having it, and the people who could write the plugin won’t because they understand the security implications! The plugin writers are saving the novice users from themselves!

Hacking the blog source code can be done to achieve the same thing, but it makes it really difficult to upgrade. On each upgrade you will have to reapply the changes which can be time consuming. If the changes are written as a plugin then on upgrade you can simply reinstall the plugin and your done. Another advantage is that the widget interface provides all sorts of facilities that help with positioning the widget in different locations on the screen.

I am the only person on this blog so I don’t have novice users to keep an eye on, I have the technical expertise to write the plugin and I fully understand the implications. I’m sure there are others, like me, out there that don’t have the time to research the B2evolution plugin architecture.

Ultimately, I would like to build a LinkLift plugin but this seems like a good first step.

The plugin provides the ability to add user defined PHP code inside a widget. I have labelled it as a development release. It will probably remain like that because I don’t want people to assume that because it is stable it is safe - because it isn’t and will never be.

If, however, you are a responsible single user or you would like an example of how to write a b2evolution plugin, then you will probably find a number of uses for this.

For information on source, installation and downloading this plugin then go to B2evolution - Free PHP Widget Plugin