The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post today helping the users of the OctoberCMS content management system build a "soft delete" plugin by extending the functionality already included in the code.

Developers usually stick with a new CMS for its simplicity and extensibility. OctoberCMS presents itself as a back to basics CMS, and provides an enjoyable experience for both developers and users. In this article, I’m going to demonstrate some aspects of the CMS that make it extensible, and we’ll also try a simple plugin to extend another plugin functionality.

The tutorial starts by talking about extensibility and how plugins play into it in most normal CMS software (in their example, its listening to an event fired when a new post is made). They start by creating a new plugin skeleton via the "create:plugin" artisan command and creating a migration to extend the database with the "soft delete" column. After running the migration, they add in a new listener for an "extendColumns" event and extending the filter to extend the scopes pulling out posts data. They further extend the functionality with a helpful trait filtering the data by the "deleted_at" value and adding that into the scope as well. Finally they add a listener onto the Eloquent events for the "deleting" event to capture it and set the "deleted_at" value on the post record and save it.