“Re: Does Conversant Answer Your Question?”

*** One of the things I don't get is what Andresen means by Conversant being modular. When he starts talking about plug-in architecture he kinds of loses me. Is he saying that there is something equivalent to an open API that third parties can write external software to interface with Conversant? ***

That's because you've not seen Conversant's code guts. :-P One of the great things about the way it's built (and for which Brian was largely responsible) is that it's designed to be very, very extensible without breaking any existing code. You can create a "plug-in" for Conversant that will tap into, change, or override any aspect of its functionality. If you want that plug-in in your system, you can just drop it in. If you don't want it any more, it's easy to pull it out. The Weblogs, HTML Enforcer, and all of the interfaces (WWW, Newsgroup, E-Mail) are all plugins that can be included or not without affecting Conversant's basic functionality.

The API for plugins isn't open yet, but I think the plan is still to make it open fairly soon, which will allow third-party developers and Macrobyte customers to add whatever plugin functionality they want to.

Sean