Okay so I had found a way to do MVC plugins, but it didn't work in my environment. So now what do I do?
Well I still wanted to work in the MVC framework somehow. Maybe not for showing my plugin control, but I did want to somehow handle form submissions cleanly. Mainly for administering my control (configuring it as neccessary). So what did I do?
Well I went back to the way I've done plugin architectures in the past. I defined an interface that would get used by my site to interact with the plugin. The interface looks like
public int ExtensionId - Uniquely identifies this plugin.
public virtual bool IsBlogSpecific() - Is the control configured differently for each blog, or the same configuration for the entire site?
public virtual ExtensionDisplay ControlDisplay - How to display the control on the page and handle its submissions.
public virtual ExtensionDisplay AdminDisplay - How to display and admin UI and handle its submissions.
bool HandleSubmission - Handle the submission for the particular display.
So how do these classes work? First I added a screen to allow a user to select what plugins to use on the site. Once a plugin is selected, it's loaded up, and its assembly information is stored in the database. Then to show the control on my page I created a ViewUserControl called BlogExtensionsSection. This will go out and load up all the allowed plugins, and display them using the ControlDisplay.GenerateHTML method. Nice and clean there. No problem. You can actually see the results on this page. My Google Ad is actually a plugin control that I created and added to this page dynamically.
Now I still had the problem of how to configure this control. I didn't want to hard code my Google Ad settings into my control, what's the point of that? If I ever got someone else to use this software then I'd have to go back and revamp my customized software. So I need a way to administer the control and save its settings.
That's when I came up with the AdminDisplay. This is used on four different pages. The first is on the two pages where I allow a user to admister the site or a particular blog. On those pages I go out and load up all the registered plugins, and based upon those generate a link for each one that allows a user to administer the particular plugin control.
You can see the Configure Google Ads link that was dynamically added in this screenshot.
If you click on that link your taken to a page whose sole purpose is to host the AdminDisplay elements. This pages Controller will just call into the particular plugins HandleSubmission method, and its view will just call into the particular plugins GenerateHTML page.
You can see a sample of an admin page here (its still not made to look all pretty, but it works)
It all worked great. Now I just needed to save the settings that I was making.