On start, mana9er creates an instance of class Core and starts the Minecraft server according to configuration as a subprocess. After that, the plugins are loaded in the order they appear in the plugin list in the configuration.
To know what's happening in the Minecraft server, an event-driven interface is provided to the plugins in the signal-slot mechanism of PyQt. Plugins can connect the signals provided by the core or mcBasicLib to their slot functions. For example, the core provides a signal sig_server_output to carry the output of the Minecraft server, and mcBasicLib provides a signal sig_login representing the event that a player enters the game. There is also a signal sig_command in the core representing user input on the server command line.
To send commands to the Minecraft server, use write_server method of the core to write text to the standard input of the Minecraft server, or use methods like stop_server and start_server.
A plugin is a folder named by the plugin name. When used, it should be put under the location where mana9er-core is and added to the plugin list in the configuration file. Under the plugin folder, there should be a __init__.py, in which there is a load function. It is called by the core when it loads the plugins in the form load(log, core), where log is a logger introduced later, and core is the instance of class Core that the plugin interacts with. You need to do the initialization work when load is called, like loading configuration, creating instance for you class, and connecting signals to your slots.
The return value of the load call is stored by the core, and can be retrieved by get_plugin. If your plugin is not the dependency of some other plugin, you can just return None.
The class Logger provides a unified way to print logs. It has several methods like info and warning and decides whether to output logs for each log level according its log level setting. In the initialization, the core creates a logger for each plugin and passes it to the plugin when loading it. These loggers will add sender information (the name of corresponding plugin) and time stamp when printing logs.