[wp-hackers] Idea for a GSoC project

[DD32]

http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6015
I've been intending to apply for SOC this year, So far i've not had the time to though..

I was hoping that 2.5 would be released before the SoC applications started, So that most people could get a look at the automatic upgrader before mentioning installing from wordpress.org
(RC2 is out btw: http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-rc2/ but go ahead and use SVN too)

What I invisioned would be a Set of side tabs(allthough it'd most likely be horizontal header tabs) to select the location to pull plugins from, eg:
| Popular | Featured | Recently Updated | Latest | Search |
(And there'd be a plugin hook on those, so with a plugin, you could either remove some tabs, or add your own, that'd mean highly customised installs could setup a internal location to install plugins from for example)

and then a table much like the plugins table in 2.5, With an Install action instead of Activate/edit

The search tab would allow you to search by tags, search terms, or Plugin name.
Given theres a few thousand plugins in some tags, It'd need to have paging support, say 20-40 plugins shown at a time (Seems high to some, but keep in mind when skimming over a long lis of plugins, there'll be many your not interested in at all) possibly with an ajaxified loading of next page data, allthough it might be better for user experience for it to be an actual pageload, that way on slower connections, allthough theres more headers, the plugins list shows up gradually rather than a huge wait and chunk.

It'd require a new api on wordpress.org as well, RSS feeds just dont cut it for anything other than featured/latest/popular, which I'd be happy to write up providing someone gave me a crash course on bbpress :P

Any opinions from anyone?

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:25:03 +1100, John Blackbourn <johnbillion+wp at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just throwing this idea out there in case anyone wanted an idea for a
> WP GSoC project, or indeed just because it would be cool.
>
> Now the automatic plugin upgrade system is in 2.5 (well, almost) a
> great thing to add to the Plugins screen would be a WordPress.org
> Plugins Directory [1] browser. It could allow users to see the most
> popular plugins, browse by tag, search, (all using AJAX and the host
> of RSS feeds on WP.org) and of course -- the killer feature -- one
> click installation using the built-in plugin upgrade functionality!
>
> John.
>
> [1] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
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