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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-30T05:37:48+00:00

I’ve been reading about how to create a new plugin for Phonegap and seems

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I’ve been reading about how to create a new plugin for Phonegap and seems to get it by following this tutorial.

http://wiki.phonegap.com/w/page/36753496/How%20to%20Create%20a%20PhoneGap%20Plugin%20for%20iOS

However, I’m having a hard time grasping how to extend an existing plugin. (not creating a new one)
Been reading this tutorial.

http://hiediutley.com/2011/03/28/phonegap-tutorial-series-3-extending-the-phonegap-api/

I can’t seem to get where I can possibly add line of codes to the .m file for example. In my XCode, I only see the .h files but not the .m file.
Or is there a better way to extend an api?

Thank you,
Tee

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    EDIT: This answer is no longer completely correct.

    The latest versions of Cordova / PhoneGap do not come as a compiled framework and it is much easier (especially since 2.2.0) to tweak the version of cordova a particular app uses as it is simply a sub-project in XCode.

    To get at the .m files you would have to download the PhoneGap (Cordova) iOS source and make your changes them compile your own version of the PhoneGap framework.

    That is not as hard as it sounds, but can be a bit daunting if you are not super comfortable with Objective-C and command line compilation tools.

    To paraphrase the README from the iOS source, for example:

    $ git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-cordova-ios.git

    Make your changes, then…

    1. Launch “Terminal.app”
    2. Navigate to the folder where the Makefile is (./PhoneGapLib ?)
    3. Type in make then press Enter

    This should build “PhoneGapInstaller.dmg” into the dist folder. This is what you use to install your new version of PhoneGap.

    Another option is to take the .m and .h files of the API you are extending (by simply getting them from the GitHub source repository) and making them into a new plugin with your own name. As an example, rather than extend the Camera API and make changes to Camera.m and recompile etc… I chose to make a plugin unoriginally called MyCamera that had the code from the Camera API and my own extensions. Most of the APIs in PhoneGap (at least in iOS) are basically already plugins in their own right, so they don’t need much tweaking to be turned into a plugin just for your purposes.

    This method also means you can upgrade PhoneGap later and not clobber all your extensions.

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