Can the 3rd tagpart of a plugin be used freely, or does it HAVE To be the name of a method?

Question

I'm trying to make a plugin that I need to be as simple as possible to use. If possible, I want the usage to be:

{exp:pluginname:anytext}

And the output to be:

anytext

Obviously there will be more to it than just that, but the essence is that I need the "anytext" bit to be any bit of text, not a hard-coded method.

I've seen plugins that make use of the 4th tagpart, eg. {exp:ce_img:make:anytext ... }, where the anytext bit gets used as a variable prefix. Unfortunately, when I try to do something similar, but using the 3rd tagpart instead, I get an error:

Error

The following tag cannot be processed:

{exp:pluginname:anytext}

Please check that the ‘pluginname’ module is installed
and that ‘anytext’ is an available method of the module

Answer 1

Why are you trying to go about it like that? If you need to make the plugin as simple as possible, the Tag Pair syntax is far easier than trying to understand why you want a text input as a segment of the tag:

{exp:my_plugin}
    anytext
{/exp:my_plugin}

EE Plugin parsing library always looks for a method in your plugin class if you have a second tag part. So you can't do it your way, however, if you want to use four segments like CE Image:

$tag_parts = $this->EE->TMPL->tagparts;

In an example:

// {exp:my_plugin:anytext:stuff}

$tag_parts = ee()->TMPL->tagparts; 

$tag_parts[0] = "my_plugin";
$tag_parts[1] = "anytext"; // ALWAYS evaluated as a plugin_name::anytext()
$tag_parts[2] = "stuff";