[wp-hackers] Google Summer of Code 2007

[Michael D Adams]

On Mar 14, 2007, at 4:31 PM, Mark Jaquith wrote:

> On Mar 14, 2007, at 5:47 PM, Peter Westwood wrote:
>
>> Is this plugin browser _only_ going to support plugins hosted on  
>> wp-plugins.org or will there be future functionality/apis to allow  
>> external hosted plugins to be easily listed?
>>
>> If so determining an API and support for these maybe another good  
>> SOC project.
>
> The idea is that SVN *is* the API.  You could probably just use  
> svn:externals to have it hosted elsewhere and synced to wp- 
> plugins.org  Slightly less easy is setting up a script to commit  
> your external changes to wp-plugins.org

An interesting idea.

As it stands, the zip files the plugin directory produces for  
download are made from an `svn --ignore-externals` for the sake of  
sanity.  (I'm sure people will want to discuss *that* choice in a  
different thread :) ).  Also, the plugin directory only knows to  
update itself because of a post-commit SVN hook fired by the SVN  
server.  Apparently, doing frequent `svn co` or `svn export`of the  
entire repository puts an unacceptable load on both the web server  
hosting the plugin directory and the SVN server hosting the repository.

Also, incept and update times are calculated from the repository.

So there are some technical details to overcome if we want to  
introduce different SVN repos or other means of file hosting into the  
mix.

There are social ones too.  I have no idea if wordpress.org would be  
willing to host or even reference non-GPL stuff.  Perhaps wp.org  
could host the parsed readme and link to the "real" location of an  
"external" plugin, but that may not be in the cards either.  It's  
already hosting content for which it has given up complete control.   
I don't know where I would draw the line, and I'm not one of the ones  
who would draw it anyway :)

The short of it is: round 1 will be only those plugins hosted by wp- 
plugins.org, but that these are good things to think about.

Relatedly, Matt (Mullenweg) once suggested that wp.org offer a widget  
of some kind that a plugin author could put into a plugin's homepage  
and would talk to the Plugin Directory: reporting stats, allowing  
rating and maybe comments.  That sort of thing.  Perhaps something  
like that would mitigate a plugin author's reluctance to host on wp- 
plugins.org.

The design of such a widget and the complementary API might be a good  
GSoC project too :)

Mike