This weekend I thought I’d buckle down and get crackin’ on some NodeBB plugins. I figured that over the next little while I’ll write a few plugins that I’ve been accustomed to using over the years with other forum software. This will give me a chance to find potential flaws in the plugin system and also give me the opportunity to set up various hooks in important places in the core.

More importantly, with a few skeleton plugins for people to look at, I’m hoping we can garner some interest in it from third-party developers.

I’m happy to say that I’ve released my first NodeBB plugin on NPM. Well… it’s actually my third, but the other two are “tutorial” plugins (check them out: Sample Admin Page and Sample Static Page).

So on to the fun stuff. The Cash MOD for NodeBB is a points plugin which awards the user virtual currency every time they post. They get more points per character typed, which gives the user a bit of an incentive to write higher quality posts. It isn’t a fully featured points addon yet – for example, we ought to have an ACP panel to modify user’s points – but the basics are all in (feel like improving it? fork it! :)).

Does this mean we could see an RPG addon built for NodeBB? Perhaps a port of ADR from phpBB? Or how about an Avatar system like Nulavatar? Man, that would be pretty cool… maybe one day after NodeBB development comes to the end of the roadmap I should really take a crack at it.

Click through to see screenshots of the Cash MOD in action!

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Screenshots

The Cash plugin for NodeBB is installable via npm, view source on github.

npm install nodebb-plugin-cash

If you’re interested in writing your own plugins read my previous post or head over straight to Julian’s tutorial on writing plugins.