Tailor vs regular plugins

Questions
#1

Hi everyone,

I’ve read the docs but I still don’t really understand the purpose of Tailor vs regular plugins.

Anything that could help? I think the idea of Tailor is to develop faster but not sure why/how and if it can be limited at some point.

#2

Read this: Tailor features into builder - #2 by samgeorges

#3

Hey @apinard

Tailor is indeed a lot faster and easier to learn, however, it makes some common assumptions that sacrifices flexibility. If you are coming from a background of working with plugins, using plugins is still “the way”. You won’t need to redo anything since your work is already following the October CMS patterns.

Tailor implements a newer approach to translation called Multisite, and this is a feature that is available to plugins, including RainLab Blog (with modifications). Here is a link to the multisite trait documentation: Traits - October CMS - 3.x

The Multisite trait is more robust because it uses different models for each locale/site. Whereas the Translate plugin simply swaps specific attributes on the same model. Both have pros and cons, both still offer value for specific scenarios, and we will continue to maintain both.

Regarding the RainLab suite, these plugins were intended to be examples to showcase the possibilities with October CMS. So if you are using them as a basis for your work, then this is also the way.

Moving forward, we recommend designing new plugins in Tailor and then using the Builder plugin to convert them to plugins. This is a powerful way to scaffold your plugins.

For basic content, we recommend staying in the Tailor ecosystem because it provides native tools for managing content, such as drafts, scheduled publishing, import/export, previewing, etc. We will continue to improve Tailor for content-focused use cases, such as content owners, revision history, etc.

This is a design decision that should be made by you:

  • Tailor is 10x faster for development and saves you a lot of time (content focused)
  • Plugins take more time to develop but have greater flexibility (data focused)

The content focused RainLab plugins (Blog, Pages, Sitemap) are still good as a plugin, but they have difficulty covering a “one size fits all” scenario like Tailor can. The Tailor equivalents of these plugins are included in the demo theme and the implementation uses far less code.

For example, the entire Sitemap plugin is just two files using Tailor:

Hopefully this helps to clarify the purpose of Tailor.

2 Likes
#4

Awesome. Thank you @daft

1 Like