Cacti 0.8.8a and Plugins

Today I needed to install some plugins into my Cacti 0.8.8a install. Cacti has been a great graphing tool for many years here, and the 0.8.8a update has added a lot of cool things. One of them is the built in Plugin Architecture (Previous versions required you to install Cacti, then download the "PIA" and patch files and make manual edits to get it to work). However, being used to the old ways, I was having trouble using the "simple new way" and I didn't find much out in the wild about making it work. It really is simple! Just:

1. Download a plugin from somewhere like Here
2. Extract the contents of the tarball (it should make a subdirectory)
3. Move the subdirectory to the cacti/plugins/ directory (mine is /var/www/html/cacti/plugins/)
4. Open up Cacti in a browser
5. If you see Plugin Management on the left, skip the next step and just go there
6. Go to User Management, pick your user and check the box next to "Plugin Management".. refresh the page and then go to "Plugin Management" on the left menu.
7. You should see your plugin listed. Hit the arrow down button to install it, and then the arrow right to enable it!

NOTE: The problem I had is this: The directory your plugin is in (for instance, mine was "cacti/plugins/aggregate-0.7B2") CANNOT HAVE NON-ALPHA CHARACTERS.

So, basically, I followed all of these instructions, wondered where the heck my plugin was, and started scraping through code. I finally found the line that looks for available plugins had input_validate_input_regex(get_request_var("id"), "^([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$"); did I then realize, "Hey, maybe if I took that - and the . out of the filename..."

So I moved it, hit refresh on the Plugin Management page and saw my plugin appear.