`flask plugin new` wrote views to frontend/src/views/<name>/ and a route file
to frontend/src/router/routes/<name>.js. Every one of the 16 bundled plugins
keeps its frontend in plugins/<name>/frontend/ instead, staged into
.plugins-staged by stage-frontend.mjs and aggregated into routes.gen.js.
It was not visibly broken, which is why it lasted: the router still globs
./routes/*.js during the Phase 4 dual-location transition, so a scaffolded
plugin's pages loaded. What a new plugin author silently lost was ADR-013 lean
builds. Pruning works off the staged tree, so a frontend in the core tree
cannot be excluded from a site build, and deleting the plugin strands its
views behind.
The templates for the correct layout already existed; only the output paths
were wrong. Also fixed the imports they carry: core imports now use the @
alias (@/api, @/components/...), which resolves both before and after staging,
where the previous ../../api was correct only in the old location. Sibling
views stay relative and travel with the route file.
frontend_dir is gone from scaffold_plugin. There is no second output tree to
point at, and a plugin developed in its own repo now gets the same frontend as
a bundled one rather than being skipped.
Proven end to end: scaffolded a throwaway plugin, confirmed it stages, builds
real chunks, and that SITE_PLUGINS=network prunes it, which is what the old
layout could not do.
- flask plugin new now scaffolds the frontend too: List/Detail/Form
views on the global styles, a gated route module (ADR-009), and an
api-client snippet emitted into the plugin dir. Views are written
before the route file so a partially generated plugin cannot 500 the
dev server.
- docs/PLUGIN-EXTERNAL-REPO.md + scripts/test-external-plugin.sh: how a
sister site develops a plugin in its own repo and runs the framework
contract tests in CI against a pinned framework ref (script verified
to fail on a broken core_version pin).
- docs/CONTRACT-STABILITY.md: settled vs churning contract surface and
the provisional 1.0 criteria.
- CLAUDE.md active-state refresh (contract 0.6.0, 11 plugins, 340
tests, measuringtools done).
Known limitation documented: Path.rglob does not descend symlinks, so
the import-surface contract test skips symlinked external plugins.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
