> What will help developers are stronger constraints on what may be > safely extended, and places to converge, coordinate and agree on > names and methods crossing between plugins, so that for example, > my geotagging plugin works with someone else's maps plugin. > I can see this is starting to happen in TW5, with more functions > protecting features using closures, and exposing in a uniform way, > using jQuery like function chaining. >
Agree. More open APIs with a clear event mechanism (probably based on jQuery custom events), and plugins will be able to go a lot further without monkey patching. The tiddler chaining concept will be a massive boon. > Finally, what might help users build their own editions is if the process > of > finding good quality plugins was more streamlined. I hesitate to say > "core" or "standard" plugins, or even "app store" but a simple and reliable > way of discovering and including high quality extensions will help keep > the mico-kernel core as small as possible and yet allow TiddlyWiki5 to > become as rich and feature complete as people would like. > > I agree entirely and have been very keen to see this kind of micro-kernel core, all this assumes it's easy for users to add and customise plugins. So that's one of the most important things to me. Speaking to regular users of TiddlyWiki, those who aren't even aware this group exists, I've met very savvy developers who use TW as a general scrapbook and aren't even aware of plugins, let alone knowing how to install them or how to make them. Right now, backstage lets you import a tiddlywiki and then select plugins. But I would like to see a much friendlier approach - a place where you can browse, search, and install plugins at a single click. This would be a "blessed" - official - plugin repo, well-maintained, patrolled for spam etc; hopefully building on the work that Saq, Fred, and others have already done on this kind of thing. The protocol and source code would be open, so that anyone else could set up the same thing for someone to point to. This is a widespread phenomenon when it comes to open source plugin architectures. Prior art includes: WordPress, Firefox, Chrome, Vim, jQuery, Eclipse IDE, and many more. All of those are open-source projects which still have an official place for plugins, to go along with the thousands of other places they can be found elsewhere on the web. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWikiDev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywikidev?hl=en.
