Framework Sites has a plugin feature to help developers distribute features to multiple sites at once, and maintain them in a single place.  The following example illustrates this process by examining how a custom blog control is distributed between a set of sites.

Goal:  

• Have multiple sites that use a custom control that can be easily updated, tested and maintained in a single place.

Solution and general development work flow:

1. From your frameworksites.com account, add the new plugin under the installation you are going to use to develop the plugin.
2. Create a custom blog plugin on this staging and test environment.  This will contain any tables or shared methods you will use in your elements.
3. On this stage build some elements for a blog control:
   * The blog featured list element
   * The archive and search element
   * A single article view element
   * Tag cloud element
4. Test the plugin and its elements and ensure they are ready for publishing.
5. Under the 'properties' tab of each element, assign the element to a plugin by choosing the plugin name in the drop down.
6. Publish the plugin to your frameworksites.com account
7. From your frameworksites.com account, add the plugin to the sites on which you want to use it.
8. Under each site pull down the new plugin and you are ready to go.

If later on you decide to add a new feature or fix a bug in one of the elements or in the plugin, just make some changes on your stage, then use steps 6-8 to publish and upgrade the plugins on the sites that use it.

We are close to launching release 10 of FWS::V2 and have done some major documentation efforts under the library.    Check out our master branch on GitHub to see the development activity.   We have many high volume production sites using the pre-release version of 10 and the performance is outstanding, and the new feature set for developers is setting a great foundation for some more exciting things to come.

A few more tasks of house keeping need to be done before the release is ready but the reviews, and responses are very positive.   Thanks for everyone's help on making version 10 solid, stable, and the first full release of FWS that can be used as a web based rendering engine without the distributed version.