WordPress Plugin as ‘Library’ From Abstract Application?

Here is my thought, and I could be digging myself a huge hole. That’s why I’m here 😉

I am looking to develop a complex application but I want this application to run both as a standalone script as a wordpress plugin. Later I may develop into a Joomla plugin and so on.

My thought is I develop an abstract custom framework and then implement the custom functionality via extending this framework. Does that make sense?

So say WP_Plugin extends My_Engine, and then that plugin class will act as factory to manage the custom functionality in the WordPress /lib/wordpress/ directory.

I really don’t want to have to repeat myself and I would definitely be producing multiple versions of the app.

Any thoughts?

The way I’d go about this is build your standalone application but build into it a bullet proof API that will allow others and yourself leverage the power of your application.

Whichever way you look at it there will be a fair amount of coding to be done each time you visit a different CMS as they all have different ways of dealing with things. If your app has good API controls others could then make their own modules for other CMS’s that you never knew existed, thus not limiting you to the likes of WordPress and Joomla.