In this recent post on the Zubma Fitness Engineering site, Chris Saylor looks at using events in your applications to hook in plugins to easily (and dynamically) enhance functionality.

In many instances, having a plugin system (even for closed-source applications) is a convenient and safe approach to adding functionality to a product. It minimizes risk by not having to modify the core of the source. In this article, I'll be discussing how we implemented a plugin system for our cart software to allow for plugins.

Its implemented a bit like the Observer design pattern - you "register" the listening event which can then be activated by a "trigger" method with the event's name. These events are stored in a registry (static) so they can be accessed across the application.