Enabling and Disabling Plugins

A few Ares plugins are designed to be optional so you can easily disable them if you don’t need them for your game.

To enable or disable optional plugins:

1. Select Admin -> Setup.
2. Select “Enable or Disable Plugins”.
3. Check or uncheck plugins to enable/disable them.

What Does Disabling a Plugin Do?

Disabling a plugin will:

• Make all of its commands give a ‘huh?’ message when someone tries to use them.
• Hide its help files.
• Disable its event handling (so events like cron triggers and characters connecting will not do anything).

What Doesn’t Disabling a Plugin Do?

Disabling a plugin does NOT:

• Remove its code. Everything is still loaded.
• Remove fields from the database. All the data is still stored.
• Remove its web pages. You can still access them if you manually type in the address. (But they won’t do anything useful.)
• Remove it from the web portal menu. You must edit your menu configuration yourself.

In other words, the plugin is still there - it’s just hidden and can’t really do anything.

Why is it Better to Disable?

You might wonder why you’d want to disable a plugin instead of just excising its code completely. Why keep around code you’re not using?

The main reason is that other Ares code is designed to look for these plugins. For example, the profile code might say “If the ranks system is enabled, show their rank.” If you remove the ranks plugin completely, that code will break.

Also, removing existing code will cause you some version control headaches if you later want to upgrade to a new Ares version.

Advanced Config

To configure advanced plugin settings:

1. Select Admin -> Setup.
2. Edit plugins.yml

config_help_links

When you’re editing a config file, there’s a link at the top to the help for those configuration settings. Usually this links to the default arescentral config tutorial. For your own custom-made plugins, you might want to point the help somewhere else - perhaps a wiki page or a README file on your github repo. Just set this up to be a hash with the name of the plugin and the help link.

disabled_plugins

This is set when you enable or disable plugins as described above. Don’t update it manually.

extras

This is set when you install extra plugins. You may need to manually edit it if you remove one.

optional_plugins

For internal use only.

unlogged_events

These are event names that are not logged when they’re handled (for spam purposes). If you add custom events and don’t want them logged, add them here. Cron and Pose events are unlogged no matter what you put here.