Suggestion on direction -- for me

Hi folk,

Something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time here is to write a plugin, we’ll call it ninja for now 'cause this is gonna get confusing, that serves as an extension to the plugin system. What ninja would do is provide an interface for configuring what plugin repositories that the openfire administrator wanted to pull from. I would define some sort of .xml file that the repositories would provide that describes what they have, and all ninja would do is go to the repositories it knows about /whatever.xml and routinely pull an updated list of available plugins. After that it would behave similarly to how the built-in plugin mechanism does. (though it would probably not tie -directly- into it, it would act on it’s own accord, and probably create a new “3rd Party Plugins” tab)

Now… this has been on my list for a while and I want to make it happen sometime soonish. My question for you all is, shall I go forth with my plugin concept or do you feel that I should mess with Openfire itself and allow 3rd party repository support.

Thoughts?

Daniel

(ps, I posted this here because it may have some bearing on how we handle plugins on igniterealtime as a whole)

Well, i dont know. This would be great to handle everything in one list, but on the other hand can get complicated, especially when you’ll have to explain to a new user, that some plugins are from the main repository and others not. But it would be nice to have any of the solutions added. Looking at the Plugins menu right now i see that there can be another tab near Plugin Admin, like “3d Party Repositories”, where you can manage urls and maybe what plugins you want to sync, as they can have same plugins. And then on the Plugin Admin tab in the side menu can be “Available 3d Party Plugins”? I dont like the idea to have completely separate Tab for 3d party plugins. I would rather drop them manually then

And who will maintain such repositories? I can mirror some bits i think. My host is nearly empty and unused so far.

I would imagine the person whose 3rd party project it was would handle their own repository. I would be hosting mine off blathersource.org. And in my case I would envision a simple document that says “to add this to your openfire repository, go here and type this”. Exactly the same way that debian repositories are added in ubuntu and friends really.