All,
The general attitude/perspective to new/additional functionality in TW
tends to be: "Keep the core small and backward compatible", leaving many
interesting additions to plugins. In order for this to be a viable thing to
do, I think we need to think critically about:
1. How do (particularly new) users find out about new/existing plugins?
- The "resources" information on tw.com. There is something
unsatisfying/unclear about this. New users are bombarded with 30 ways to
save, let alone a collection of links to other pages, many of which are
dead, no longer supported and/or do not work with the current version of
TW.
- The "Get more plugins" button on a fresh TW install - this links to
the official TW plugin library, which lists 54 "official" plugins. I
actually like this, and its how I first found out about plugins.
- The most complete answer to this seems to be: google group threads.
This requires new users A. find out about our google groups and actually
go
it - B. Subscribe/read/search for new plugins/additional functionality.
- A great option would be a "web store"/"app store" equivalent like
chrome/firefox/smartphones have. Also, other tools have "package
managers"/communities that make this easy. For example, sublime text has
package
control <https://packagecontrol.io/>, vim has vim awesome
<https://vimawesome.com/>, etc. which tell you what versions this
plugin supports, always points to the latest versions, offers comments
underneath plugins, tells you what plugins are popular, most installed
etc.
2. How do users install plugins?
- The drag-n-drop method (and additional files-based-method on node)
is actually a very user-friendly and easy to understand method.
3. How do users update (and find out about updates) to plugins?
- Many plugins get updated to fix bugs, keep up with TW, and add new
features. Many other plugins just get out of date/abandoned/unsupported.
- To find out about updates you have to: A. go to authors website
which is hopefully (but rarely) listed on readme and reinstall or B. Stay
subscribed to google groups
- As an example, I recently went through and updated my plugins - I
had to go to many different websites (searching google groups for some),
and check version numbers, and update accordingly.
- I think some centralized method for "check for and install updates"
would be a fantastic addition to the community.
With a centralized repository of plugins, we could also enforce
certain plugin structure, as Joe recently recommended in another thread.
Things like:
- author name
- email
- website
- license
- supported TW version: an optional field which could force a plugin to
only work on select versions of TW, which a person could override.
So, some solutions/ideas are:
1. A centralized repository of plugins, very much like package control
<https://packagecontrol.io/>for sublime text
2. An "update" method
- Your TW could check installed plugin versions with that on our
centralized repo, letting you know if you need to update.
- As I understand, it still couldn't actually "fetch" the updated
plugin tiddler from github - you need to do this manually - is this
correct?
What are others thoughts on this topic?
Best,
Diego
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