Creating a New Screen in the Application
One of the fundamentals of building a more complex Movable Type plugin, is the ability to create your own screen in the application to expose functionality beyond the scope of the core application. This is important for example to:
- create a listing screen that shows a table of data relating to your plugin.
- create an editing form to input data into the system.
An important part of building a good experience for your users, is to allow these screens you want to create to appear as a completely seamless extension of the core application. It would be awkward for example if every plugin you added to Movable Type looked and behaved slightly differently. Not only would that make it difficult for your users to learn how to use your plugin, but it also would cause Movable Type as a whole to look disjointed and poorly designed.
The good news is that the Movable Type application framework makes it easy to create additional screens that inherit the functionality that is and should be common across all screens within Movable Type. The following section will guide you through the following three steps in creating your own screens within Movable Type:
- Register a method to route requests to the mode handler
- Define a mode handler which populates the template’s context with data
- Create a template for rendering the contents of the page
