Plugins shipped with s9y core

Discussion corner for Developers of Serendipity.
garvinhicking
Core Developer
Posts: 30022
Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2003 9:45 pm
Location: Cologne, Germany
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by garvinhicking »

Hi!

My main wish is to make the core as small as possible, and to make maintenance as easy as possible for releasing s9y versions. The problem with bundling plugins from spartacus with a release is that it will deliver outdated plugins in releases. Everytime a plugin in spartacus is updated I would need to build a new release file, that would suck. Also, updating plugins that came with a release file through spartacus might be harder due to permissions; so in an ideal world, actually no plugin would come with the release, but everything would be fetched through spartacus, except some really "core" functions.

I see the sharebuttons as more a feature of a template, they could be added as options to 2k11 rather than bundling a full plugin (which impacts performance also more than within a template).

Autosave and updating in the core is a great thing.

Livesearch is IMO something that is a toy gadget, and could impact performance of the blog very badly (due to the many HTTP requests) so this is actually a plugin I wouldn't need in the core, but could even be put into spartacus?

Staticpages is a huge plugin that could still change quickly, so I wouldn't want it bundled with the core due to maintenance.

I don't really like enabling plugins like these by default, simply because they impact performance and memory load, and still many people might not need staticpages (my blog doesn't!) or want the impact of livesearch....

Regards,
Garvin
# Garvin Hicking (s9y Developer)
# Did I help you? Consider making me happy: http://wishes.garv.in/
# or use my PayPal account "paypal {at} supergarv (dot) de"
# My "other" hobby: http://flickr.garv.in/
yellowled
Regular
Posts: 7111
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2006 11:46 am
Location: Eutin, Germany
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by yellowled »

garvinhicking wrote:I see the sharebuttons as more a feature of a template, they could be added as options to 2k11 rather than bundling a full plugin (which impacts performance also more than within a template).
:shock:

One paradigm for 2k11 has always been to keep it small and simple, which also means to limit the number of options to a bare minimum by only adding options useful for (almost) everybody. I don't see a simple interface in the theme options to configure sharing buttons. In my opinion this definitely should stay in a plugin.

YL
garvinhicking
Core Developer
Posts: 30022
Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2003 9:45 pm
Location: Cologne, Germany
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by garvinhicking »

Hi!

I think one could argument for both ways; one see social sharing as integral to a template, others see it as a functionality of a plugin. If you as a template author don't want the hassle of supporting it, I sure can understand that, also if you have a "lean and mean" vision of the template.

Personally I can live with both, but I'm more reluctant of moving plugins from spartacus to the core (because we currently have no way to fetch core plugins from spartacus, and I think this cannot be easily implemented anymore -- only the other way round, moving core plugins to spartacus). And currently, many s9y releases live for as long as a year; if plugins get only 3 updates a year, I would need to create 3 new release files for every plugin change... :-/

Regards,
Garvin
# Garvin Hicking (s9y Developer)
# Did I help you? Consider making me happy: http://wishes.garv.in/
# or use my PayPal account "paypal {at} supergarv (dot) de"
# My "other" hobby: http://flickr.garv.in/
Timbalu
Regular
Posts: 4598
Joined: Sun May 02, 2004 3:04 pm

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by Timbalu »

Garvin, I do not understand the point of releasing a new S9y Version all time when changing a delivered by release plugin. We even don't do this now.

As I said already, the point to make this independent, is to have all Plugins to live in Spartacus. Then a Serendipity release can include some important (core) plugins (I am with you there, see above) and stick with them. If they are updated, Spartacus takes care about it. For the very few out there not using Spartacus, this will be the limitation to stick with "old/released" version until they upgrade manually or wait until a new Release is announced.

The social sharing thing is much more a "political" statement in these days. I would fight for just supporting this as a plugin only! ;-)
Regards,
Ian

Serendipity Styx Edition and additional_plugins @ https://ophian.github.io/ @ https://github.com/ophian
onli
Regular
Posts: 2825
Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2008 10:04 pm
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by onli »

Ian +1

That's why I moved the plugins from internal_plugins.inc.php to the spartacus-folder, in preparation for such a system. It wouldn't even be important whether on install, spartacus fetches them or they are in the archive and updateable via spartacus, i think the last one is the more hassle free version.
Timbalu wrote:I would fight for just supporting this as a plugin only!
Fine with me, and I'd like to have the 2-click-version as default.

I made a list with sidebar-plugins used in the wild. Not complete of course, but in the end, I'd like to let the default selection be influenced by such a list.
yellowled
Regular
Posts: 7111
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2006 11:46 am
Location: Eutin, Germany
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by yellowled »

garvinhicking wrote:If you as a template author don't want the hassle of supporting it, I sure can understand that, also if you have a "lean and mean" vision of the template.
It's not about maintenance, it's about keeping a (proposed) default template as simple as possible. (Yes, there are options in 2k11 now which probably should be removed to fulfill that requirement. I have that on my agenda, but I'm kind of preoccupied with the backend atm. :wink:)

My main concern is that any interface I can imagine to configure this would make the theme options way more complicated even for users who don't want to use social sharing (which I guess are quite a number among s9y users). That's why I would like to keep it “stashed away” in a plugin.

YL
garvinhicking
Core Developer
Posts: 30022
Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2003 9:45 pm
Location: Cologne, Germany
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by garvinhicking »

Hi!

My points is this. We only create a s9y release file once, and this release usually lives for 6-12 months.

If we included a larger amount of plugins that live in spartacus, then people who download s9y 12 months after its release, they will get plugins inside that ZIP/Downloadfile that are long outdated. They will install s9y then, and the first they have to do is update a huge body of plugins possibly. I always hate that, when I download a release file and first have to update other stuff after the installation. Also, it cannot be guaranted that spartacus works on really every server, and sometimes spartacus simply makes trouble, so we should not really rely on this for fresh installations.

If people would download a core s9y package with few plugins, and then spartacus offers them to download "popular plugins" I think that would be the better way. Then they would not download (and upload to their server) a huge list of plugins they might not even use. And the upside is, if someone installs plugins at this point, he will not think of the plugin as being outdated and needing an update, because he justs installs it.

What about adding some "presets" to spartacus to propose Bundles? Like a plugin bundle for "social blogs", one for "CMS-like blogs", one for "Photoblogs" and whatever? Or like a "heavy user" or "recommended by onli/ian" pluginlist? I could imagine that in the spartacusplugin much more than in one central forced release version.

Regards,
Garvin
# Garvin Hicking (s9y Developer)
# Did I help you? Consider making me happy: http://wishes.garv.in/
# or use my PayPal account "paypal {at} supergarv (dot) de"
# My "other" hobby: http://flickr.garv.in/
yellowled
Regular
Posts: 7111
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2006 11:46 am
Location: Eutin, Germany
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by yellowled »

garvinhicking wrote:I always hate that, when I download a release file and first have to update other stuff after the installation.
Me too. I would totally support a s9y distribution model which doesn't bundle any (external) plugins or themes (besides the ones absolutely necessary) and thus even more encourages to use spartcus if at all possible.
garvinhicking wrote:What about adding some "presets" to spartacus to propose Bundles? Like a plugin bundle for "social blogs", one for "CMS-like blogs", one for "Photoblogs" and whatever? Or like a "heavy user" or "recommended by onli/ian" pluginlist?
I'm not so sure about the “recommended packages” (that's pretty subjective, I guess), but the “type of blog quickstart” bundles sound pretty cool. They could probably even be combined with a recommendation for a template, i.e. “use Mimbo or Kinetic for magazine-like CMS sites” or ”use $WHATEVER for photo blogs” …

YL
Timbalu
Regular
Posts: 4598
Joined: Sun May 02, 2004 3:04 pm

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by Timbalu »

..."recommended by */*" pluginlist
You must be joking..! :wink: I would not want to go this way, as it makes starting decisions for newbies extremly hard.

At least from my side we are talking not about bundling more plugins within core, than re-thinking, which are most possible core functions (plugins) to start a simple (recommended) Serendipity blog. To make the core as small as possible, and to make maintenance as easy as possible for releasing s9y versions is a goal of us all, I presume.

I can't follow this "ugly upgrade stuff" argument, since I still think the way we had it before was simple and effective, having some hardbundled Plugins which do not blow up Plugin namespaced Servers Ram usage. These hardly ever change and could reside just there. And, beside this, add three to (six?) plugins like spartacus(*), dashboard, autoupdate (**) and [...] ! These only should also live in additional Plugins, but as long as Spartacus does not come activated, you will not get any upgrade notices, so you don't need to upgrade a bunch of plugins when installing later on. On release date, they were/are the current and best available versions to work with (like we have now).
If - and I still think most people will do, if they know about it - the user activates Spartacus, the one wants to have all current updates. And everyone will be happy to get the latest ones, without having to upgrade the whole system. That is why I still recommend to have them live in Spartacus too.

(*) Just as an example, upgrading a 1.6x to 1.7 was recommended to upgrade plugins before. The old spartacus file errored with a bunch of ugly PHP 5.4 notices, which would not have occured, when the Spartacus plugin changes would have been upgradable.

(**) These two I personally would release activated by default.
Regards,
Ian

Serendipity Styx Edition and additional_plugins @ https://ophian.github.io/ @ https://github.com/ophian
yellowled
Regular
Posts: 7111
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2006 11:46 am
Location: Eutin, Germany
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by yellowled »

Timbalu wrote:dashboard, autoupdate (**)
serendipity_event_dashboard will become part of the core in 2.0 anyway. As for autoupdate, this might also be a plugin which does not work on any server. I don't think we want to activate those by default.

YL
garvinhicking
Core Developer
Posts: 30022
Joined: Tue Sep 16, 2003 9:45 pm
Location: Cologne, Germany
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by garvinhicking »

Hi!

autoupdate should be something that could get added by default if it proves stable for several more versions of s9y - because it can possibly have huge security impacts I'm reluctant to enable it by default.

Now, of the current 2.0 plugins I would keep:

serendipity_plugin_archives
serendipity_plugin_authors
serendipity_event_creativecommons
serendipity_plugin_calendar
serendipity_event_emoticate
serendipity_plugin_categories
serendipity_event_entryproperties
serendipity_plugin_comments
serendipity_plugin_creativecommons
serendipity_plugin_entrylinks
serendipity_event_mailer
serendipity_plugin_eventwrapper
serendipity_event_multilingual
serendipity_plugin_history
serendipity_event_nl2br
serendipity_plugin_html_nugget
serendipity_event_s9ymarkup
serendipity_plugin_plug
serendipity_plugin_quicksearch
serendipity_event_spamblock
serendipity_plugin_recententries
serendipity_event_spartacus
serendipity_plugin_remoterss
serendipity_event_statistics
serendipity_event_templatechooser
serendipity_plugin_superuser
serendipity_plugin_syndication
serendipity_event_textwiki
serendipity_plugin_templatedropdown
serendipity_event_trackexits
serendipity_plugin_topexits
serendipity_event_weblogping
serendipity_event_xhtmlcleanup

and those I would remove:

serendipity_plugin_shoutbox
serendipity_event_textile
serendipity_plugin_topreferrers
serendipity_event_bbcode
serendipity_event_contentrewrite
serendipity_event_karma
serendipity_event_livesearch
serendipity_event_searchhighlight

Hm. Not really sure if this makes any sense.
# Garvin Hicking (s9y Developer)
# Did I help you? Consider making me happy: http://wishes.garv.in/
# or use my PayPal account "paypal {at} supergarv (dot) de"
# My "other" hobby: http://flickr.garv.in/
bernd_d
Regular
Posts: 468
Joined: Thu Jun 03, 2010 9:28 am
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by bernd_d »

garvinhicking wrote:and those I would remove:
...
serendipity_event_textile
...
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Or, you make an textile2markdown-converter ;)
yellowled
Regular
Posts: 7111
Joined: Fri Jan 13, 2006 11:46 am
Location: Eutin, Germany
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by yellowled »

Plugins I would put up for debate:
garvinhicking wrote:serendipity_plugin_calendar
The use of this seems to have gone down to a minimum. Just sayin'.
garvinhicking wrote:serendipity_event_mailer
serendipity_plugin_eventwrapper
serendipity_event_multilingual
serendipity_plugin_history
All of the above seem to cater to rather specific needs to me …?
garvinhicking wrote:serendipity_plugin_remoterss
Also very specific needs.
garvinhicking wrote:serendipity_event_templatechooser
serendipity_plugin_templatedropdown
That seems to be used purely for testing to me …
garvinhicking wrote:serendipity_event_textwiki
Why keep textwiki and drop textile? Where's markdown?
garvinhicking wrote:serendipity_event_weblogping
I might be wrong, but aren't most of the services pinged by that dead anyway?
garvinhicking wrote:serendipity_event_xhtmlcleanup
Might become obsolete with the switch to HTML5 anyway. Not sure what exactly this does, though.
garvinhicking wrote:and those I would remove
I agree with all of them.

One more thing: markup plugins. If we want to ship markup plugin(s) with the core, we should pick one in my humble opinion (my choice would be Markdown). I agree it's nice to have a lot of them available, but I think the average user is confused by the number of choices here.

Then again, most users seem to be perfectly fine with NL2BR + Serendipity Markup or using the WYSIWYG editor. I assume that CKE integration in 2.0 will even boost the number of WYSIWYG users.

Anyway, I don't think it helps (new) users to have a handful of markup plugins shipped with the core. It's my impression that using Markdown, Textile or BBCode is pretty much an informed choice by people who explicitly want to use those markup helpers. If that's true, it would be perfectly okay to keep them on spartacus.

YL
onli
Regular
Posts: 2825
Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2008 10:04 pm
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by onli »

Let's cycle back a moment.

I'd like to have only very few default plugins installed - spartacus for the rest of them, the sidebar-plugins which are used right now by many blogs (see my list of current usage, i'll make a spread sheet right now) and a few event-plugins (the spamblock-combination, staticpages, ...). I don't care whether they are in the archive or fetched on install, but I agree with Ian that having them in the archive would be alright and the regular update just for plugin-updates Garvin feared not needed. That is what spartacus is for.

I think Garvin meant with his list "plugins delivered on install", and I don't think we should include any plugin we don't want to activate by default. So all the plugins with very specific need and plugins not used anymore, like the calendar (only 2 of my reference blogs used him), shouldn't be included at all. And like so often in the past, i fully agree with YLs remarks ;)
onli
Regular
Posts: 2825
Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2008 10:04 pm
Contact:

Re: Plugins shipped with s9y core

Post by onli »

PS: My sidebar-plugin-data as spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... 0s4TDJMLVE

The result would be to enable syndication, categories and last comments and mayba a html nugget with example content.

We would also need a way to login, superuser probably should be set anyway.
Post Reply