Completing the Compatible Extension

Putting it all together...
This article is the final part of the four-part series of articles about developing extensions with compatibility in mind.

Let's put it all together and see how it works. You have your class defined.
Now you need to put it in a file by itself. Give it a meaningful name related to the system it's running on like compat.mambo.php.
Then create some logic to load your script based on the system version.

Here's an example:

$path = 'somePath';

$version = someCoreClass->getVersionName();
switch ($version) {
	case 'jimbo':
		require_once("$path/compat.jimbo.php");
		break;
	case 'joebo':
		require_once("$path/compat.joebo.php");
		break;
	case 'mambo':
	default:
		require_once("$path/compat.mambo.php");
		break;
}

Conclusion

You now have a compatible system that will be easy to upgrade and maintain. Whenever something changes, just edit the appropriate compat.xxx.php script, upload it to your system, and you're ready to go.

Submitted by: Al Warren 17:15, 25 January 2007 (CST)