ReDBox and Mint are based on a plug-in architecture. A number of plugins are available to assist you in integrating with your institutional system. The sections within this page describe plugins that can be used with your ReDBox or Mint system and advise you as to the level of support to expect. It's important to remember that ReDBox is an open source system and a number of plugins may be developed by different sites, based on their requirements.
Core: this is considered a central feature and will be available with each release. Those with a Support agreement are able to log issues against any bugs found in this plug-in.
Stable: whilst not part of the core system, sites are using the plugin successfully. These plugins are not covered by the Support agreement
Developmental: this plugin has not been fully tested and is made available with no support provisions. The developer may assist sites that encounter problems but there are no guarantees.
In order to use the plugin at your site you'll need to establish an institutional build.
For those seeking technical information about the various plugins, please refer to The Fascinator website or, for third-party plugins, the link provided against the listing. The "Access" column provides a link to the Maven Central location of the plugin artefacts - for use in your Maven POMs.
As ReDBox-Mint is based on The Fascinator platform, all ReDBox plugins use the platform interfaces. You should get a firm grip of The Fascinator's architecture before you look to write your own plugin.
If you have written a plugin for ReDBox, please let us know through the Discussion Group.
Harvester plugins load data into ReDBox and Mint.
Note: the alerts system loads data into ReDBox via a slightly different model and is considered to be a Core feature.
Transformers provide renditions of the harvested information for a variety of uses.
A number of plugin types can be grouped under "security":
Authentication plugins define how a user's login is verified
Roles plugins are used to list possible roles and indicate the assignment of users to roles
Access Control plugins define which users/roles can access each object stored in the system.
In most cases, developers are likely to be wanting a new type of Authentication or Role plugin to suit their organisational security infrastructure. Access Control is largely an internal component but is presented as a plugin to allow for future flexibility.
Objects and their renditions are stored in the storage layer. This is a generic storage layer and may not make full use of the underlying repository's features.
Subscriber plugins can listen to changes in the system and handle them as needed. Useful for logging and notifications.
The Apache Solr indexer plugin is the only one available in the system. Whilst fashioned as a plugin, development of various interfaces increasingly made use of the Solr API. Whilst you can create a new indexer plugin please be aware that this is likely to require a range of development work to bring the system into line.