MyBB Community Forums

Hi all,

Hope you are all keeping well. I wanted to share my thoughts on the subject of "Official Plugins" moving forward to start getting something put into action.

The term "Official Plugins" would be reserved for plugins from current team members.
An additional showcase section named either "Featured Plugins" or "Recommended Plugins". It is likely this would be an additional page on MyBB.com and/or shown on the Extend site/Community forums.

End users would be able to submit their Plugin to the team for us to discuss the possibility of it becoming showcased but the exact requirements are TBC at the minute. They would need to submit information to us including screenshots of the plugin, brief description and following a discussion they would be informed of the decision.

As of right now we are just looking to see users thoughts on the idea of Featured/Recommended Plugins and if it would be supported. If you do support the idea please can you also leave any suggestions you have for the criteria you would like to see used.

I love the idea, namely because plugins are a huge part of what makes MyBB as extensible and powerful as it is. MyAlerts, for example, is installed on countless forums. Someone shopping for forum software might not be aware that there is a powerful alerts solution available, and having it directly within some sort of documentation would help bring some press towards some of those plugins.

The way I see it is simple: The term "Official Plugins" should be non-core components that are written by the team, to extend MyBB. The term "Featured Plugins" should be plugins that are used on the community - where they're obviously being featured, and "Recommended Plugins" should be plugins that would be recommended by the team (or a majority of the community in a number of threads, for example).

The idea would be close to what @s3_gunzel (your past username was easier to type and shorten ), there would be at least two "categories" of plugins.

"Official Plugins" will be limited to projects where team members take part in, "Featured Plugins" would be a way to feature _popular_ plugins in a better way so users get to know them more easily. "Recommended Plugins" would be recommended features regardless of their popularity.

How "Recommended Plugins" will diverge from "Featured Plugins" is to be discussed.

The reason to open this thread is to discuss the topic and get the community to contribute on building the concept.

Please note that "Official Plugins" won't be a large list, whereas "Featured Plugins" or "Recommended Plugins" could be any plugin in the Extend site and the advertising mechanisms used for each one could and most probably will vary for each one.

Featured plugins could be reserved for unique and new plugins that can get a spotlight or special attention following their release. That could keep "Recommended plugins" available as a long term list of plugins that are popular in the community.

It also frees up Featured Plugins for pretty much anything that the team wants to put a spotlight on without making its purpose ambigious.

IMO we should stick to featured extensions (i.e. showcase):

Quote:

• maintaining a list of strict requirements (novelty, ease of use, good presentation on Extend, optimal operation, no bugs, clean code with no hacks/tricks that we can point new developers to look at, no licensing issues, active developer(s))
  
• candidates would be discussed and reviewed in depth in The Lounge
  
• induction allows for Community engagement (nominations, non-binding voting [before/after the requirements filter], @mybb tweets with feature description & screenshots, possibly posts on the Blog to showcase extension possibilities)
  
• selected projects can be labeled on Extend, shown at top positions in default sorting, and added to a dedicated page
  
• the promotion for extension authors should help cultivate Extend how we want (taking advantage of key features, conforming to standards)
  

There may be problems with steady capacity to maintain official plugins, and recommended extensions may be unnecessary with users' Stars on Extend (originally Recommendations, made more universal a few years ago).

Let me disagreing a little bit...

(2020-04-08, 08:55 PM)Omar G. Wrote: [ -> ]"Official Plugins" will be limited to projects where team members take part in,

Why distinguish something made by a team member ? Do you think team members are better than other people ? I know you don't said that, but it's a kind of discrimination. And what about former members ? Or futur ones ?

(2020-04-08, 08:55 PM)Omar G. Wrote: [ -> ]"Featured Plugins" would be a way to feature _popular_ plugins in a better way so users get to know them more easily. "Recommended Plugins" would be recommended features regardless of their popularity.

And so, the most popular plugins are promoted, the others stay on the floor.

Being serious... The "Official plugins" could exist, they could be plugins validated by the team, and the team will be a garantee. Even if the plugin was created by someone out of the team.

The "recommended plugins" could be like a coup de coeur* of the community, and why not have every quarter a poll "what are your favorite plugins" to choose which will be in the list.

And the "Featured plugins"... difficult question


* if anyone could give me the english idiomatic expression for that, I'll thank him

(2020-04-08, 09:50 PM)Crazycat Wrote: [ -> ]Why distinguish something made by a team member ?

Because if using the "Official Plugins" concept, there should be a reasonable guaranty by the "MyBB Team" to ensure development of such plugins at least to its functional state. With "team members" you have some guaranty for continuous development or updates. This is the reason suggestion for using the "Official Plugins" approach is to limit it to a short list.

(2020-04-08, 09:50 PM)Crazycat Wrote: [ -> ]And so, the most popular plugins are promoted, the others stay on the floor.

Lesser _popular_ plugins could be _features plugins_ if the abide by the guidelines, which are to be set and can be discussed here.

However, it is obvious that the attempt of _featuring_ plugins is for new users or _clients_ to get to know the best plugins available. A element to determine such _best_ plugins would be by usage, aka _popularity_, yes.

(2020-04-08, 09:50 PM)Crazycat Wrote: [ -> ]The "Official plugins" could exist, they could be plugins validated by the team, and the team will be a garantee. Even if the plugin was created by someone out of the team.

This is a option, yes. Currently if that was the case mostly plugins chosen would be certainly plugins developed by team members, since we would be the same reviewing and we already know vast of the code.

But we are also considering using or expanding the usage of the Collaborators feature in Extend, so a team member necessarily being the author of a project is not required. Team members could just be Collaborators of "Official Plugins", if that was the case, as it is a possibility.

(2020-04-08, 09:50 PM)Crazycat Wrote: [ -> ]The "recommended plugins" could be like a coup de coeur* of the community, and why not have every quarter a poll "what are your favorite plugins" to choose which will be in the list.

I agree with @Devilshakerz:

(2020-04-08, 09:28 PM)Devilshakerz Wrote: [ -> ]recommended extensions may be unnecessary with users' Stars on Extend (originally Recommendations, made more universal a few years ago).

We don't necessarily need to have three categories (official, featured, recommended), we could have just two, one of them "Recommended" could be built using stats from Extend (downloads, subscribe or reports count, etc).

My reasoning to use the "Official Plugins" approach would be to eventually maintaining different packages of MyBB features without having to code them in-core. This could have various benefits, two of them being:

1. Releasing "official plugins" updates without users having to update the core and vice versa, and
   
2. Having official examples of both simple and complex plugins for third-party contributors to base on, as we start changing how the core works (the plugin system, parser, etc) developers could more easily port their contributions for future MyBB releases (1.9, 1.10, etc).
   

(I'm not saying 1.9, 1.10, etc will get huge changes that will break plugins, it might be or might not be the case.)

(2020-04-08, 09:50 PM)Crazycat Wrote: [ -> ]* if anyone could give me the english idiomatic expression for that, I'll thank him

"A crush", I would say.

(2020-04-08, 08:55 PM)Omar G. Wrote: [ -> ]The idea would be close to what @s3_gunzel (your past username was easier to type and shorten ), there would be at least two "categories" of plugins.

Heh, well, the idea was to discourage people using it. So, you know... it has clearly worked. Haha.

I still feel like it shouldn't necessarily be a secret what plugins are used here, now that policy has changed; and that should be "Featured", per the definition of the word featured.

(2020-04-08, 09:50 PM)Crazycat Wrote: [ -> ]coup de coeur*

[...]

* if anyone could give me the english idiomatic expression for that, I'll thank him

"Heart Stroke".

You're welcome.

I understand your idea about official plugins, and I agree with the responsability of the team. And if you expand the usage of collaborators, I agree too.

Thanks Omar and s3_gunzel (I confirm, your previous name was easier to wrote) for the translation, I think I'll keep "crush"