Bundle Developer's Guide

Since Pimcore utilizes the powerful Symfony Bundle system, let us refer to the Symfony Bundle Documentation on how to get started with your custom bundles. A bundle can do anything - in fact, core Pimcore functionalities like the admin interface are implemented as bundle. From within your bundle, you have all possibilities to extend the system, from defining new services or routes to hook into the event system or provide controllers and views.

Bundle Directory Structure

See Bundle Directory Structure for a standard bundle directory layout.

Pimcore Bundles

There is a special kind of bundle implementing Pimcore\Extension\Bundle\PimcoreBundleInterface which gives you additional possibilities. These bundles provide a similar API as plugins did in previous versions:

• The bundle shows up in the extension manager and can be enabled/disabled from there. Normal bundles need to be registered via code in your Kernel.php.
• In the extension manager, you're able to trigger installation/uninstallation of bundles, for example to install/update database structure.
• The bundle adds methods to natively register JS and CSS files to be loaded with the admin interface and in editmode.

See the Pimcore Bundles documentation to getting started with Pimcore bundles.

Generating Pimcore Bundles

With the Pimcore Bundle Generator we provide a tool for generating bundle skeletons. You can install and activate this bundle in your development instance and so simplify starting Pimcore bundle development.

# generate bundle interactively
$ bin/console pimcore:generate:bundle

# generate bundle with a given name and don't ask questions
$ bin/console pimcore:generate:bundle --namespace=Acme/FooBundle --no-interaction

# activate bundle
$ bin/console pimcore:bundle:enable FooBundle

Common tasks

Below is a list of common tasks and how to achieve them inside your bundles.

Service configuration

If you want to provide custom services from within your bundle, you need to create an Extension which is able to load your service definitions. This is covered in detail in the Extensions Documentation.

An example how to create an extension for your bundles can be found in Loading Service Definitions.

Auto loading config and routing definitions

Bundles can provide config and routing definitions in Resources/config/pimcore which will be automatically loaded with the bundle. See Auto loading config and routing definitions for more information.

i18n / Translations

See the Symfony Translation Component Documentation for locations which will be automatically searched for translation files.

For bundles, translations should be stored in the Resources/translations/ directory of the bundle in the format locale.loader (or domain.locale.loader if you want to handle a specific translation domain). For the most cases this will be something like Resources/translations/en.yml, which resolves to the default messages translation domain.

Security / Authentication

You can make full use of the Symfony Security Component by auto loading the security configuration as documented above. Best practice is to define the security configuration in a dedicated security.yaml which can be imported from your bundle's config.yaml.

For further details on security please refer to Security.

Events

To hook into core functions you can attach to any event provided by the Pimcore event manager. Custom listeners can be registered from your bundle by defining an event listener service. Further reading:

• Symfony Event Dispatcher for documentation how to create event listeners and how to register them as a service
• Pimcore Event Manager for a list of available events

Local Storage for your Bundle

Sometimes a bundle needs to save files (e.g. generated files or cached data, ...). If the data is temporary and should be removed when the Symfony cache is cleared, please use a directory inside the cache directory. The core cache directory can be fetched from the Kernel and is registered as parameter on the container:

• $kernel->getCacheDir()
• %kernel.cache_dir% parameter

If you need persistent storage, create a unique directory in PIMCORE_PRIVATE_VAR, e.g. var/bundles/YourBundleName.

Extending the Admin UI

The following section explains how to design and structure bundles and how to register for and utilize the events provided in the PHP backend and the Ext JS frontend: Plugin_Backend_UI

Adding Document Editables

See Adding Document Editables