The race is on to make plugins, and the forum is awesome for discussions.

 

I suggest that authors start releasing using the wiki, so instructions, versions, dates, compatibility and author/responsible are easy accessible

That way the wiki becomes the catalog and users can choose the plugins they want.

 

/Rene

What we need is a UnRaid plugin market 

What we need is a UnRaid plugin market 

 

Entirely possible if a standard template way of defining the plugins is used.

What we need is a UnRaid plugin market 

There will probably be something once 5.0 is final and the plugin architecture is flushed out.

What we need is a UnRaid plugin market 

There will probably be something once 5.0 is final and the plugin architecture is flushed out.

 

That would be awesome, something as simple as mozilla plugin website would be very handy actually, I'm myself struggling to install a plugin and that would definitely save my day.

You should be able to use the unRaid Plugins page on the wiki.

 

Click the edit tab and add your plugin to the table.  You will have to upload the logo and .plg files, or I suppose you could put links to these files if stored somewhere else, just take care not to "leech" (e.g., by putting a link to your icon that is stored on some other site that's not yours - every time someone downloads the icon it will come from that other site - sure it's small but still bad manners).

 

What I'm thinking is that this page can be rendered directly inside the Plugin Manager with appropriate controls to let you view, for example:

- just installed plugins (and if a newer version is available)

- installed plus all available plugins

- plugins of a particular type

- etc.

 

For now use the Type column to reference the menu page your plugin icon will show up on.

 

If someone wants to take a stab at formatting the page a little nicer, be my guest  

 

 

What we need is a UnRaid plugin market 

I totally agree with this, and can see so much potential in doing so.  Having said that, the Apple market and the Android market follow strict development guidelines and procedures to maintain consistency and reliability.  We would need to adopt a similar standard if we wanted it to succeed.  As has been stated, once Tom has finalized the architecture for the plugins, this should be something that is easy to implement and enforce.  I would add a rating system is needed, and that the plugins should be vetted by one of the community devs like Joe, Bubba, ProStuff, etc.  Or Tom, if he is so inclined. 

What we need is a UnRaid plugin market 

I totally agree with this, and can see so much potential in doing so.  Having said that, the Apple market and the Android market follow strict development guidelines and procedures to maintain consistency and reliability.  We would need to adopt a similar standard if we wanted it to succeed.  As has been stated, once Tom has finalized the architecture for the plugins, this should be something that is easy to implement and enforce.  I would add a rating system is needed, and that the plugins should be vetted by one of the community devs like Joe, Bubba, ProStuff, etc.  Or Tom, if he is so inclined.   

A rating system is a good idea.  It would be similar to the Motherboard Rating System that was developed.

 

vetting a plugin before it can be released would be a large task but I would be up for it with the stipulation that turnaround would NOT be instantaneous and might take a week or more.  Just like the apple app store and android market some testing would have to be done to check the basic functionality and make sure it plays nice with other plugins that might exist.

Yeah, due to the generous permissions I could see a **rogue** plugin erasing all data..

 

Yeah, due to the generous permissions I could see a rouge plugin erasing all data..

 

Is the colour important?

 

 

Rating is crap, because it tells nothing about the rated object, it tells something about the raters state of mind, at the moment of rating.

Not a "how much do I love/hate this app" rating system.  Prostuff understood my meaning...

 

A rating system is a good idea.  It would be similar to the Motherboard Rating System that was developed.

The venerable and solid motherboard rating system currently used by this community verifies the reliability and stability of a product.  That is what I was meaning for user designed plugins.

 

Yeah, due to the generous permissions I could see a **rogue** plugin erasing all data..

Exactly.  Some coders are little more than scripters who can copy and paste, and have no experience or training on debugging or bulletproofing.  When dealing with an OS whose sole purpose is to protect data and provide redundancy, the last thing we need is a plugin that destroys that functionality, whether maliciously or incidentally.

 

vetting a plugin before it can be released would be a large task but I would be up for it with the stipulation that turnaround would NOT be instantaneous and might take a week or more.  Just like the apple app store and android market some testing would have to be done to check the basic functionality and make sure it plays nice with other plugins that might exist.

I totally understand the workload this would introduce.  But I feel at some level it will be necessary, if only to prevent a catastrophe as above, or to prevent malicious code.

 

A real valuable information would be "how many are actively, right now, using this plugin"

How would you accurately capture this information?  The servers don't phone home, and most users won't notify anything if they remove a plugin.