Derailed by Trac (plugin repository)

  • I don’t know where else to post this. I’m not a developer, but a WP user, and a plugin researcher (will this one do cool stuff for my site?), downloader, and installer.

    In the last day and a half, I’ve followed links to two different plugins, and read verbage to the effect of “It’s now located at the plugin repository.” I follow the link there, and, frankly, I’m baffled.

    branches? tags? trunk? I’m sorry, but I don’t know which of those items contains the plugin. I spent a little while yesterday clicking various links
    Browse plugin (oh, that effectively reloads the page I’m on)
    Click up the hierarchy. No help there.
    Click in the folders. Nope, nothing in any of them.
    Click around elsewhere. All links and destinations tell me pretty much: this is a place for developers. We have this easy-to-use [!] tool for you to versioning subversioning control ticket authors blah blah blah… all of which tell me, a user, “Get the hell away from here; this place is not for you!!” So I left.

    Today I followed another link there, and this one took me into the trunk directory which actually contained some files that look kinda like other plugin file names I’ve seen (now we’re starting to get somewhere). But there were more files than were listed on the referring page, and directions to click some “as original” link at the bottom of the page. Nope, I didn’t see anything like that. (oh! wait a second, I did after clicking the link to the file itself. So in order to download 5 files, I had to click 10 links: one to the file, then scrollscrollscroll to the bottom of the page, then click the Save As Original link. Multiply times 5.).

    I gather the whole thing is pretty new and developers are still finding their way, but is this place designed to be used by “end users,” such as myself, and if so, will it always be this difficult?

    What happened to some nice way to download all the contents of the plugin, i.e., as a pluginname.gz or pluginname.zip file? Is there no way to use this system to generate a compressed archive on the fly?

    Any way to add something to the effect of a link or blurb at
    root/pluginName level… (below all the site nav stuff at top and above the Name/Rev/Age/LastChange line) …something that’s directed to the end user that answers the question, “what to do now that you’re here”?

    Here’s hoping that these questions help to make it the plugin repository a better place. I think. I hope.

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)

  • This topic has been raised by others and development of the wp-plugin.org site is on-going.

    Thread Starter AuntiAlias

    (@auntialias)

    Groovy. Just wanted to raise the issue if it hadn’t been. ??

    If plugin developers are really making this new site the sole source of their plugins before a usable interface is put in place, that sends out a pretty clear message that they only want fellow hackers to download them ??

    I’m sure wp-plugins.org is really handy for them, but as things stand wp-plugins.net is much more useful for the rest of us.

    I have found a ton of links and announcements of the new repository and I have to tell you, that even from the view of a veteran web user, it sucks. I can’t cleanly get to any information about the plugins, nor find them if I already have info on them. Real messy, and easy to fix, maybe. The people who created the plugins featured them originally on their site, so copy and paste the info into the FIRST page that pops up when the link to the plugin is clicked.

    I like the idea, but until this is more user friendly, you all need to stop sending people there to GET plugins. Make sure your promotion is to those who make plugins only and not to the public who just wanna use them.

    I speaketh too sooneth. After finding some icky things like we’ ve mentioned, I know have found that some of the plugins have user friendly pages. Much improved!

    I agree that for users who want to get plugins the site needs quite some streamlining. https://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/PluginDirectory is a beginning. Automatic creation of tarballs and zip files would be cool as well (just for tags should do).

    I make plugins, and I can’t even figure it out, thats why I dont upload to it ??

    I can only echo what the other people are saying. If it takes 3 hours to read all the directions and get everything set up just to download one plugin, what is the use? I worked on it for several hours yesterday and never got it to work. I have been raving to everyone that will listen how user friendly WordPress is. I hope none of those people that switched to WP will see the difficulty in using the repository and hold it against me. I’m not a newbie when it comes to this stuff and if I’m finding it difficultto use, then there is an issue. I love the idea behind the repository I just wish it had been set up to download with a simple click of the mouse.

    Which plugin ?

    and

    https://wp-plugins.net/

    It was one of the spam comment plugins. I found one off Kitten’s site that was in .zip format for download and downloaded it that way.

    wp-plugins.net is nice but it would be better if you could filter out 1.2 plugins…

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
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