This is a thought I had looking at the blog plugin. Hopefully it
might help other developers in picking up infinitas.
The Blog Plugin has an element called right_boxes.ctp. I'm sure
you're using this filename as a convention. I also noticed it holds
both comments information AND information unique to the plugin
itself (blog posts pending, etc).
1: I think you should rename these elements to 'widgets'. Namely
because position is arbitrary, say if a css designer makes a new
admin layout with different placement. Widgets seem like small
bodies of factoidal information.
2: I think you should move the 'comments' php into it's own
comment widget. Make this widget available to all plugins that have
commenting enabled. This way, developers only need hassle about
functionality they bring to the table (pending blog posts). In
addition, when designing the layout, they can choose wether or not
they want to display this widget AND the comments widget.
I might be wrong in assuming you stack right-boxes together. I
may also be suggesting a poor solution due to the issue of which
plugins/tables/features implement the comments, or how those
comments are counted, may be too unique from implementation to
implementation in order to generalize.
I hope this isn't confusing
dogmatic69