Hi all,

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 11:34 PM, Tom Boutell <[email protected]> wrote:
> A two-letter prefix of your own on filenames, replacing the sf prefix,
> is very common.

Although this is a common way to name plugins, it is not the
officially recommended one. Fabien's latest statement is that the
prefix to be used is "sf"[1], even though he made contradictory
statements in the past[2].

I personally think that choosing custom plugin prefixes is a bad
choice. Right now, we have a lot of different plugins for the same
purpose with varying names (sfSimpleCMSPlugin, sfSimpleCMS2Plugin,
sfInstantCMSPlugin...). Mostly all of these plugins are in an unusable
state. Now if we use custom prefixes as well, this situation will get
worse (pkSimpleCMSPlugin, abSimpleCMSPlugin, otSimpleCMSPlugin... ???)

What is really missing in symfony is a clear community guideline for
developing plugins. My personal opinion on plugin development is:

1. Choose a very simple but descriptive name for your plugin (e.g.
sfCMSPlugin instead of sfInstantBoosterSimpleCMSPlugin)

2. If a plugin already exists with that name (or a similar one),
contact the author. In the best case, the author will agree that you
work on the plugin as well. If he does not or if your opinions on the
architecture of the plugin differ too much, create a new branch inside
that plugin. The highest goal would be to showcase your ideas, discuss
them with the community and the original author and eventually merge
some of the changes that work well back into the trunk.

3. Document your code excellently, write test cases and publish good
written documentation comparable to the symfony documentation.
Francois held a great presentation about this on SymfonyCamp08 [3].

4. Showcase your plugin and write about it. Write about it in blogs,
publish screencasts, do everything to arouse interest. The more users
you have, the more feedback you will get, the more developers might
eventually join your team and help you develop the plugin.

After all, plugin development is a community effort. This also means
that not everything might be solved exactly how YOU want it, but how
the community needs it. Splitting plugin development across multiple
plugins with the same purpose but no shared effort, on the contrary,
does not help the current situation.


Bernhard


[1] http://groups.google.com/group/symfony-devs/msg/4c47ffd08aed294a
[2] http://groups.google.com/group/symfony-devs/msg/90498ce79958c591?hl=en
[3] 
http://redotheweb.com/2008/09/15/developing-for-developers-my-symfonycamp08-presentation/

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