Currently, the only plug-in model supported by RSS Bandit is the IBlogExtension interface. This is a very limited interface that allows developers to write a plug-in that adds a menu option to allow the user to manipulate a single feed item.

The ability to interact with the application from such a plug-in is very limited as the interface doesn’t define an interface to the application other than a handle. (For info on how to write an IBlogExtension plug-in, see this article.)

So last night I was thinking about an email that a user sent me. He wants to know how to add an intelligent module for filtering and classifying RSS feeds to RSS Bandit. This is for his thesis project.

Since that might not be a necessary feature for RSS Bandit at this point, I suggested that he implement it in a private build. RSS Bandit is open source and he can easily obtain the source code. But it occurred to me that there are hundreds of feature requests like this that have the potential to be great solutions in the future, but would be best implemented as a plug-in in the near term.

So as I sat there thinking about it, Torsten goes ahead and implements a prototype for it. Mind you, I hadn’t talked to Torsten nor Dare about this yet, but I’m sure it’s something we’ve all been thinking about. Especially as the number of feature requests continues to accumulate.

So what areas of extensibility might we want to support? Well there’s the callback on feed item download that Torsten implemented. That alone is quite useful. I can imagine building a plug-in that would score items based on how likely I’d want to see it or not. Thus it could sort items based on importance in a special feed. This would help with the increasingly large number of feeds I’m subscribed to.

Dare mentioned (and he’ll write more on this) the idea to support new data sources and formats. For example, it’d be interesting to build NNTP support as a plug-in.

I’d also like to build the ability to provide an interface for plug-in data storage. For example, suppose you build a plug-in that keeps statistics of your RSS feeds. You might want that stored with your settings so that when you synchronize RSS Bandit, your plug-in settings are synchronized as well.

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Thinking far out there, perhaps adding the ability to support IE toolbars might be an option as I think some users actually use RSS Bandit as their primary browser.

The important thing is to design a nice interface to expose the RSS Bandit application to the plug-ins. In tandem we need to prioritize these extensibility options by looking at current feature requests and thinking about how many of them could be implemented as plug-ins.