Sorry for jumping so late into this discussion. Thanks for the kudos on
Mozilla AMO Joern.
The AMO add-on site is pretty involved. While it looks very simple on
the front-end, there's quite a bit going on on the back-end that helps
us add, disable, review, approve, diff and version add-ons.
While I like some of the ideas being thrown around, I'm not convinced
that doing away with hosting is the answer. The fact that we have a
central place for developers to come to to find plugins is a very
important advantage to the project. Although there are many plugins for
similar functionality, the fact that we have so many also needs to be
viewed as a "positive" as it offers choice to our user base. Having lots
of choices does make things confusing but I'd rather have a little
confusion than nothing to offer at all. In addition, there have a number
of cases of add-ons that have been seemingly abandoned in the repo get
resurrected by a user who needed the functionality and took it over.
If anything, I would like to see a combination of both a hosting
scenario and directory listing. This would allow those developers that
wanted to upload their plugin a place to house it while those that don't
can simply point back to their site.
I do think, as has been mentioned, that we need to get a better system
in place to properly categorize the plugins. On AMO, for example, we
have multiple categories but we also offer a recommended list of top
add-ons (about 40 of them) and in addition, for each category, we offer
a list of category recommended add-ons. This has been hugely successful
and in fact, motivates many add-on developers to really improve the
quality of their work. I can see the same thing being very beneficial to
the jQuery repo. So going with what Joern said, I think we need to get
back to listing our official plugins the way that we used to and also
create a recommended list of add-ons that we know are top-notch.
In terms of reviewing add-ons, understand that it would be a VERY big
task. On AMO, we struggle with that daily because of the number of
submissions as well as the time involved in reviewing the add-ons. At
this point, I'm not sure if we're prepared to take on that task unless
we were able to get a good group of volunteers to check the plugins.
It's definitely a good idea and again, would help the community by
giving them feedback on improving their work.
As for SVN, project management, etc, these are features that are way
outside of the scope of a plugin repo. This is something that we should
*NOT* do. We don't do this on AMO because of the complexity of this. On
AMO, we host the files necessary to install and add-on and that's it.
The developers use other services for managing their project (eg:
MozDev.org or Google Code).
I would say that in order to do this the right way, we would probably
need to build our own custom system. At the moment, Drupal doesn't seem
to provide the best way to find plugins and perhaps it's because it's
not meant to do so.
Rey...
Jörn Zaefferer wrote:
> That sounds very good to me! Releases usually consist of a download, a
> version number and a changelog. Thats all the repository should touch
> in terms of project hosting - thats also what for example
> addons.mozilla.com provides. Defining a convention to provide these
> via Google Code or a Wordpress blog with minimal effort would free
> other resources to focus on discussion and promotion of plugins.
>
> Jörn
>
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 6:17 PM, Diego <
diego.alto@gmail.com> wrote:
>> That would make sense because drupal is very poor and every plugin
>> I've ever come across has its own homepage hosted elsewhere. Maybe
>> plugins.jquery.com should focus on being a community for users - not
>> developers of jQuery - allowing users to...
>> - 'watch' their favourite plugins
>> - discuss/get help from fellow users
>> - share / rate / comment
>> - post related links to demos / tutorials
>> - stay up-to-date with the latest releases
>>
>> And the latest releases could be simply based on an XML feed form the
>> author's own website - it's probably safe to assume every plugin
>> developer has one...
>>
>> You can't please everyone - so focus on pleasing the users and let the
>> developers manage their projects however they're most comfortable
>> with...
>>
>> How about that?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Diego A.
>>
>> On Oct 14, 4:00 pm, "Nathan Bubna" <
nbu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> +1 get out of the plugin project hosting business. make the plugin
>>> site a way to list/find/promote plugins, not a place to manage them.
>>>
>>> On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 2:34 AM, Diego A. <
diego.a...@gmail.com>