In this episode, we're kicking off the fun part: starting work on our calendar feature! But before we get into building the actual date picker, we take a step back to set a solid foundation by learning how to make Alpine plugins.
You'll see why we don't want to clutter our components with piles of code. Instead, we introduce the idea of creating a custom directive—like x-picker—to neatly attach our date picker behavior to inputs. We walk through how to manually wire up AlpineJS with Livewire, and how to import them so we can tinker at a lower level and register our own plugins.
We set up our project so Alpine is accessible directly, and go over some tweaks in the project files (like updating imports and registering scripts in the layout) to make sure we're ready to roll. Once that's in place, we make a new picker.js file for our plugin, export it as a function (with Alpine passed as a parameter), and register a simple directive that for now just logs a message when it's used.
Finally, we import and plug in our new picker plugin, and confirm everything is working by checking for the console log when we use the new directive in the browser. That groundwork is done—now the real date picker building can start in the next episode!