Hosting companies can add value to hosting plans and enhance the Plesk
capabilities by adding third-party services to Plesk. In the terms of
Plesk, such services are called additional. An additional service can
be any resource available at a certain URL (like a Plesk extension, web
app, and so on), even if it is completely independent from Plesk. It can
be a spam filter, statistics analytic tool, helpdesk or other services.
The administrator and resellers associate these additional services with
hosting plans when setting up a distribution strategy. For example, if
you have a service that performs custom mail filtering, Plesk lets you
offer this service with one particular plan, for example, the Silver
hosting plan and do not offer with others.
To make Plesk aware of an additional service, you should add the service
to Plesk. In the simplest case, when the service resides on a remote URL
and does not require any notifications from Plesk, add it from the Plesk
GUI, page Service Plans > Additional Services. From there, you
can also associate the service with a custom button that is instantly
added to the Websites & Domains page of each subscriber.
Another way to add a service is to make a programming call to Plesk. The
benefit of this approach is that it lets your service to receive Plesk
notifications about the object changes. For example, the mail filtering
service we mentioned earlier must track account name changes to serve
renamed accounts as well. Though you can make a call that adds a service
and does not subscribe it to notifications, this operation does not make
much sense as it is easier to add such services through the GUI. Thus,
we consider that you will generally use programming means to both add
services and register them with Plesk Notifications (PN).
The possible inconvenience of adding services by a call is that you are
unable to edit details of the services through the Plesk GUI. Please
consider it when designing service names and descriptions. Another
peculiar feature of adding services by a call is that are not
automatically visible to customers. We recommend that you use custom
buttons or write an extension to display the service in the Customer
Panel.
PN sends notifications about subscriptions, sites, and email accounts
related to the service. The relation subscription - service is derived
from plans: A service is associated with plans, whereas subscriptions
are plan instances. If a subscription has sites or email accounts, the
changes of these supplementary objects are also tracked.
If you wish to register your service with the PN, do the following:
-
Create a service-specific class that implements interface
Plan_Item_Interface.By implementing this interface, you specify the service properties in
Plesk and define what type of changes it should receive…