RFC_Plugin_Website_Update

Proposal

The plugin website is getting a bit large and unwieldy. We'd like to redesign the website to make it more usable. Most ideas revolve around expanding our current use of categories into something like tags or keywords. The goal is to allow finer grained display of plugins on the website.

Background

The current design is fine for 20-30 plugins, but with close to 100, it becomes very difficult to digest all of the information present.

Use Cases

• Find all plugins related to "X"
• Search for plugins.
• See a tag cloud of keywords.
• See most popular plugins.

Implementation Plan

Things we'll need to do:

• Update the plugins.xml file to handle keywords.
• Update the Website UI to handle keywords and search.
• Update the website database to support keywords.

• Update the PluginManager code to support keywords and search.

Project Management

Project Dependencies

While seemingly just a webpage issue, this involves quite a bit of code. Since we'll need to touch so much code for this change, it might be worth thinking about how we could improve the design so that future changes don't require quite so many touches.

Issues

• How does this relate to 3.0 and a potentially very different plugin mechanism (i.e. P2)? Is this even worth doing if things will change substantially for 3.0?
• The website and the plugin manager do similar things, would it be worth merging the two? A Firefox add-on that pushes plugins to a running instance of Cytoscape?
• Where do themes fit in with this?

Comments

• Gary: Do we want to try to copy an existing successful plugin website like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ - the code seems to be available - http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2009/05/08/amo-is-open-source/