Ideas for framework refactoring

[kdeloach]

Ideas for changes we could make to improve the plugin framework:

Combine Plugin and PluginBase classes

The purpose of spitting plugins into multiple classes is to enforce a public API and to prevent plugins from interfering with core framework logic. I think this system is a little too rigid and I often find myself confused by this (do I need to make a change to plugin or pluginObject?). A more balanced object-oriented approach may be to represent each plugin by a single class/object. This would greatly simplify the code and make the event lifecycle logic easier to understand.

Remove "map" and "topbar" plugins

We should consider removing support for "map" and "topbar" plugins. Instead, we could update the API to support adding map controls similar to how map controls are added using Leaflet. This would allow us to clean up the plugin interface and remove support for a feature that is used to support 1 or 2 plugins (which should really be part of the core framework instead).

Remove Backbone.Picky

This Backbone plugin is probably overkill for our purposes (especially after the redesign). We could create something more fine tuned to our purposes which would allow us to remove this dependency and remove a lot of the workarounds we had to implement to get this to work the way we need it to.

[kdeloach]

Map plugins shouldn't close sidebar plugins.

Ref #734