Help: Best approach for a chat plugin

Plugins Plugin Development
1

Hi, I am looking to make a chat plugin for Sponge but I am struggeling to find the right approach to implement it the best way possible in sponge. I am hoping to find some more experienced developers to help me out with some of my questions.
The general idea of the chat plugin is to have the following features. I will include the way I intend to approach solving the issue but I am not sure all of them are the best way to ensure cross compatibility with other plugins.

Multiple chat channels which players can manually leave/join or based on permissions

Solution: Use MessageChannel

Each channel has their own template. Example: global chat will be [G] {guild} {name}: {message} and a guild channel would be [{guild}] {name}: {message}. These channels can be configured by the server owner.

Solution: Listen to MessageChannelEvent.Chat and check what the current channel of the player is with getMessageChannel(). If the channel is one of my channels, set the message with event.setMessage(Text.EMPTY, myChannel.getTemplate().parse(chatEvent), Text.EMPTY)

I was first looking into MessageChannel.transformMessage() but this does not seem to be designed for this idea as you get the result text of the event. On a vanilla server you could use this as you know the text will start with "<{name}> " and you could extract the original message, but other plugins may change the message so this is no longer reliable.

Allowing other plugins to supply values for the templates

I have seen the TextTemplate which is something I though would be the key to many of my problems, but either I haven’t tested it propperly or it seems to be lacking for what I want to achieve.
An example: A placeholder could be the name of the player (TextTemplate.Arg) but the name could have a hover over message with other placeholders and I don’t see how TextTemplate would solve that issue.
I didn’t seem to find a solution in sponge for this and the only way to accomplish it woud be trough a custom template implementation and using the PlaceholderAPI library.

Maybe I am looking at this at a completely wrong angle so any feedback would be appriciated

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It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while and I also have a system in Nucleus, which was god awful and no-one knew how to use because I made it unnecessarily complicated. So, I’ve made a PR to Sponge for a central lightweight system that other libraries could replace and extend if they wanted to, comments on that PR are welcome from anyone who is interested.

Assuming that the core dev team are happy with the idea - it’s something I’d like to get in for API 7.x as well as API 8.

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