Plugins were introduced with Family Historian Version 5, and allow new features (or features only needed by a small number of people) to be added without upgrading Family Historian itself
Plugin scripts are written in Lua, a lightweight scripting language that is ideal for embedding into more complex applications such as Family Historian
IUP is a very powerful tool for building graphical user interfaces (GUI), but it’s fairly unforgiving and the IUP Documentation is a little sparse especially when used with Lua
Some Plugins perform intensive repetitive operations, which on a large database in excess of 10,000 Individuals, may take a long time or need large amounts of memory
A pattern is a formula for matching text strings that conform to some definable criteria (experienced coders need to remember Lua patterns are similar but not identical to regular expressions)