For our development example, we'll imagine we are creating a Mambot to replace smile text with smile images.

The file for the mambot will be called mossmiles.php and it is saved in /mambots/mossmiles.php. It looks like this:

if (!defined( '_MOS_CONVERT_SMILES_MAMBOT' )) {
 // only define the function once
 function MAMBOT_convert_smiles( &$row ) {
  $smiles_src = array(
   ':)',
   ':('
  );
 
  $prefix = '<img src="images/smiles/';
  $suffix = ' height="12" width="12" alt="" />';
  $smiles_img = <a href="http://www.php.net/array">array</a>(
 
   "{$prefix}happy.png{$suffix}",
   "{$prefix}sad.png{$suffix}" )
  );
  $row ⇒ text = <a href="http://www.php.net/str_replace">str_replace</a>
     ( $smiles_src, $smiles_img, $row ⇒ text );
 }
 
 define( '_MOS_CONVERT_SMILES_MAMBOT', 1 );
}
MAMBOT_convert_smiles( $row );

A number of things are set up for a mambot. The mossmiles.php has access to a number of variables:

$row

the current mosContent object. This is an object with all of the fields in the mos_content table.

$mosConfig_absolute_path

$mask

a variable holding masks for various display options

In addition, the $row object has a property called text that the mambot will operate on to make changes to the text.

Row is passed by address to the MAMBOT_convert_smiles function so that any changes to the object made within the Mambot function are retained.

Because a mambot is called more than once during the code execution, you must ensure that the function is defined only once. Hence, a constant is defined the first time the mambot is loaded. On subsequent load, the function definition is ignored.

All modifications to the content text are made to the $row ⇒ text property variable.