Plugin Components

While the main plugin instance class of your project should implement the PluginInterface interface, the other classes should implement the PluginComponentInterface interface. Obvious exceptions are classes designed to be utilities -- and anything else that you think shouldn't (we don't know your project!).

Plugin components are simple though. They simple posses an ID, a name, and a means to get the main plugin instance. For example, our Locked Payment Methods plugin has a class for each unlock strategy and each of those classes is a plugin component. The name of the user profile unlock strategy is simply User Meta Unlock Strategy and its ID is an autogenerated hash.

The ID of a plugin component can be anything that identifies it uniquely, whereas the name is designed to be spelled out in plain English for human understanding.

As a rule of thumb, plugin components are singletons. This is not enforced, but be sure to know what you're doing if you instantiate the same component multiple times.

As you probably expected by now, there is a PluginComponentTrait trait offered that provides a basic implementation of the interface methods. Moreover, the AbstractPluginComponent class also provides sensible defaults and magic use of your getters and setters.