Textpattern CMS support forum
You are not logged in. Register | Login | Help
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
Re: New plugins site - what do you want to see?
philwareham wrote #317702:
It’s not about visibility, it’s about automating the site as much as possible. Self hosting everything is going to be impossible to maintain.
This really makes sense. The more that is automated, the more the small group of Textpattern volunteers can actually support a quality product going into the future. If plugins are to be hosted on dozens (hundreds) of diverse platforms, you end up with broken links and no consistency. We already have that now.
Offline
Re: New plugins site - what do you want to see?
Gocom wrote #317699:
I would wish the site was automated and synced itself with plug-in source repositories.
+1000
We need a way of a (one-time) registered or authorised plugin writer to be able to nominate their third-party repo instead of manually handling plugins directly on the textpattern.org site. From the third party link, we should be able to extract all the metadata we require to populate internal metadata for search purposes. This could be done on a schedule or perhaps via some post-publish hook that somehow triggered textpattern.org to refresh that author’s content.
In addition – as a separate future phase once we have the base set up – I would like to provide a feed to facilitate update flagging in the admin interface, as follows:
When visiting the Plugins panel of any installed Textpattern, it initiates a call to a textpattern.org feed URL, and passes the list of currently installed plugins and installed version of Txp along. The plugins site generates a feed, for those plugins only, that lists:
- The plugin name
- Its latest recorded version compatible with the given Txp version.
- Its textpattern.org direct download URL or endpoint where the compiled (zipped) file is available.
The results are cached somewhere in the DB with an expiry of, e.g. 24 hours.
Subsequent visits to the Plugins panel will check the cache first, although a manual ‘Check for Updates’ button on the Plugins panel can force a refresh.
When rendering the table, any installed plugins that have a version number less than the latest compatible version returned from textpattern.org will have their version number highlighted in a different colour. The version number could become a hyperlink to the plugin’s page – on textpattern.org or the third party site – allowing an admin to directly visit the site and get the latest download. Alternatively (or in addition) a one-click process could – subject to the abilities of the hosting environment – issue a file_get_contents() of the actual plugin and pass it to the plugin install() routine so the admin can verify its contents and click the Install button to upgrade it.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
Offline
Re: New plugins site - what do you want to see?
Providing a feed of plugin values would be easy if we had a GraphQL core plugin. ;)
My test code on my local machine is currently set up this way:
The system stores our GitHub API key in a global variable. Articles (plugin articles) have a custom field for GitHub repo target. Using this I pull in GraphQL data for that repo using GitHubs API.
There is a ton of info supplied by that request, which I can decide to cherry pick the important bits and display it in the article.
Alongside that there are the following manual bits to set up per plugin:
- Title
- Excerpt (or body)
- Custom field for earliest Textpattern version supported (by any release of the plugin)
- Custom field for final Textpattern version supported by plugin (If left blank assumes plugin works with all versions above earliest stated above).
- Category of plugin
- ‘Promoted’ category so we can feature plugins on the homepage.
I’d imagine we will need to use smd_bio of similar to give author info – or pull user info from GitHub (not worked that out yet).
Offline
Re: New plugins site - what do you want to see?
Yeah, we need to look into a GraphQL plugin. Promoted category could be handled by smd_featured, BTW. And yeah, I omitted stuff about bios. Effectively, a one-time author setup with a link to their external repo could be all we need.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
Offline
Re: New plugins site - what do you want to see?
Bloke wrote #317710:
[…] In addition – as a separate future phase once we have the base set up – I would like to provide a feed to facilitate update flagging in the admin interface, as follows: […]
That does sound OK if I understand correctly that it will only provide a notification to the (admin) user that a plugin has been updated. IOW no automatic updating at all. the user should still go fetching the plugin file and go through the install routine.
On the main subject of this thread, not much to add that others already noted. Thank for trying to modernise that plugin site.
Where is that emoji for a solar powered submarine when you need it ?
Sand space – admin theme for Textpattern
Offline
Re: New plugins site - what do you want to see?
phiw13 wrote #317732:
it will only provide a notification to the (admin) user that a plugin has been updated. IOW no automatic updating at all. the user should still go fetching the plugin file and go through the install routine.
Abso-bloody-lutely! Auto-update is the devil’s tool. I would like to offer at minimum:
- A link to the plugin’s page – either on the plugin repo or author-nominated third-party location.
- One click direct access to the plugin .txt file (if available) which will download and extract its contents and present it to you for verification, exactly as if you’d pasted it into the Install plugin box and clicked Upload on the Admin->Plugins panel. Thus, you still have the option of bailing out if you don’t want to complete the update process.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
Offline
Re: New plugins site - what do you want to see?
Where is that emoji for a solar powered submarine when you need it ?
Sand space – admin theme for Textpattern
Offline