I’ve touched on this a while back, but I never followed through with it. Having some down time at work, I’ve decided to jump in. I want to replace http://plugins.jquery.com.
There are numerous problems with it, and one of the reasons I got overwhelmed by this project originally is because I wanted to fix the site, rather than replace it. So now, I’ve wised up and decided to start from scratch without considering any aspect of how the site currently works.
Here are the problem areas, as I see them, in no particular order.
Browsing through plugins is ridiculously terrible
First, when you get to the page, you get a bunch of categories. Compare this with http://pypi.python.org. PyPi gives a tabular listing of 40 recently updated packages. For the Latest Releases, PJC (plugins.jquery.com) gives a full body of content for each item and goes on for a zillion pages.
Second, from the start page on PJC (with the category listing), the “Browse by Name” tab doesn’t work. The “Browse by Date” tab does work, but what date? The date the plugin was created, or the date of the last release? It turns out this is the same as the “Latest Releases” page, just the tab navigation at the top doesn’t disappear. The “All Plugins” link on the is the same as the “Browse by Name” tab and also doesn’t work.
Lastly, browsing plugins in a category gives a different layout from browsing by date. Why? It’s the same information, just sorted differently and filtered.
Searching is basically useless
Do you know why I’m surprised that people have actually used my timer plugin? Because I can’t even find it myself. Searching for “timer” yields 10 pages of results, and includes plain pages and issue tracker items.
I understand the appeal of having the bug tracker and plugin page tied together, but it’s terrible. A plugin like mine is so small that it doesn’t need a bug tracker. Not to mention that use of a bug tracker is annoying without the use of source control. The plugin author should bear the responsibility of setting up bug tracking, source control, etc. There are plenty of free sites to do that.
The search is easily bombed by adding keywords and tags (which are not moderated). So when I search for timer, the sixth result I get is for dualSlider — perfect for managing timeouts and intervals.
The Rating System
There’s no point to this. The “Top Rated” plugins all have 1-3 votes. Plugins with more votes should have more clout. But it doesn’t really matter anyway. It’s not a popularity contest.
This particular part of PJC will have no part whatsoever in my new project. If there will be any spotlighting of plugins, it will be done by moderators.
Other Data Formats
Right now, there are no RSS feeds for plugins at all. Each plugin should have its own release feed, as well as a feed for all latest releases.
Writing a plugin manager currently would involve screen scraping the existing plugin page to see if there have been any changes. Of course, you have to know the URL of the plugin because searching basically gets no where, and if by some chance you were able to search, you’d have to scrape the search page as well.
That’s why I want to have everything available as JSON. Plugin details, list of plugins by category, search results… the new site has to be highly query-able. PyPi uses XML-RPC to expose their API. JSONRPC might be an option for this, or XML-RPC, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Categories
The Categories on PJC are terrible. Not in the way that they aren’t descriptive, but they just suck. They should be hierarchical. For example, “Widgets” and “Windows and Overlays” could fall under “User Interface.” Menus could as well.
I’m not sure how Navigation and Menus are different.
DOM should probably be a child of Utilities.
I don’t know what AJAX means for a category. If the plugin is an AJAX request helper, it should go under “Utilities” or “jQuery Extension.” If it’s something like an auto-complete widget, well it should go under Widgets.
The point is, that categories aren’t very helpful in there current state. I put my Timer plugin under jQuery Extensions, Javascript, and Utilities, leading me to believe that they could all be the same category. I don’t know why Javascript is a category actually, since jQuery encapsulates, rather than extends.
The New Site
I’ve already started. http://code.google.com/p/jqpi (the app page will be http://jquerypi.appspot.com)
Basically, I want to create PyPi for jQuery plugins. I figured using Google App Engine would be nice. Also, knowing my penchant for dragging out projects, I’m coding it for HTML5, since it will probably be widely supported by the time I’m finished.
There are a few things that I don’t know how to do with GAE though. Hierarchical categories, searching, optimization, JSONRPC or XML-RPC. I’ll figure it out eventually, but help is always appreciated. Create an issue, create a wiki page, send patches, join the project, anything. We shouldn’t have to suffer the damned plugins.jquery.com any more.