Thoughts on plugins?

Question

Just a couple of suggestions, maybe others can comment as well...

1. it might be nice to seperate the plugins on this page:

http://www.question2answer.org/addons.php

into categories, maybe even onto their own page?  I guess ideally there would be a languages page, a themes page, and a plugins page, with the plugins page categorized somehow to make them easier to browse.

2. I would like to suggest that on the wiki, rather than creating pages about each plugin, just have links to the homepage for each plugin.  My reasoning is that

     a) this information may change often, and it's a bit of a chore to remember to go back and edit the wiki everytime you add a feature, and

     b) I don't think you want people other than the developer editing the plugin information anyway, given they are the ones who know where the code is at and where it's going.

3. I know I talked with Gideon about this earlier, but I was thinking about how to incorporate translations into the plugin system.  Right now, the badges plugin has a hacked language system that theoretically fits into the main translation system (I haven't tested it myself, but also haven't heard any complaints that it doesn't).  But to do this for every plugin seems a bit overkill.  So, what would be the best way to implement a plugin translation system? 

I was thinking maybe another plugin that handles plugin translations, but I imagine it would be better were it in the core.  Maybe something for 1.5?

Answer 1

1. Agree, I think I mentioned this before. It would be nice to have thumbnails for the themes and plugins too where appropriate.

2. A page for each plugin isn't really a problem IMO since many plugins don't have their own pages, just a github readme etc. And of course the wiki format means anyone can add to the feature list if it gets out of date.

As an aside, I don't think the current plugin page on the wiki is very friendly. Instead of a table maybe just a section for each plugin with one line description and link to full page.

In fact the whole wiki could be structured better. Having "/doku.php/plugins/plugins" in the URL instead of just "/Plugins" looks bad and the general navigation seems poor.

3. Maybe just a qa-lang-plugin.php file, containing the translations for every plugin? Each line has a prefix for the plugin (e.g. 'q2a_badges_word'=>). Then to translate something the admin just copies the lines to their own qa-lang-plugin.php file. Maybe a little hacky but you need to do the same process with CSS.

Comments

#3 I think it would be good to have some kind of hook, so that the plugin could have its own qa-lang-plugin.php file that would be accessed by the core... in the badges plugin, I've set it up like 'badges/string', so the core could look at a string, see if it was in the site owner's lang file (qa-lang-plugin.php, say) and if not, look through the plugins' files.  Then if the siteadmin had no such file, it would take the defaults from the plugin itself.

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Alternate solution: your plugin uses "qa-lang.php" in the plugin folder and you load that manually. Then if the user wants it in their own language they just create a specifically-named file e.g. "qa-lang-my.php" with their translation of the plugin. And your plugin checks for "qa-lang-my.php" and uses that if it's present.