I must admit that there are many plugins out there that give TC a whole new look. They are very useful and i've started using a lot of them. Call me lazy or whatever you want but i find it rather tiring to have to keep up with TC's plugins among the other 1000 things i have to do. They are not too many now but i suppose there will be much more in the future, as the plugins system is relatively new.
Perhaps it would be nice to have a plugin manager utility which would connect with TC's site, download a list of the available plugins and showing them in a tree-like form (according to the category each plugin belongs to), flaging all the approved plugins, their version (beta/final too) and a brief description of what they are supposed to do. In this utility, you could be able to select the plugins you wish to download (zip format probably), be asked to set the download directory for each plugin (you may wish to store them in a specific path) and when the download finishes, the util could unzip the plugin in a preset TC-Plugins dir and perform an automatic "installation" of the plugin with some kind of script. All parameters could be set separately for each plugin in order for the whole process to be automated.
This task would require someone (or more than one, not Christian necessarily, i suppose we wouldn't want to distract him from TC
) to make the program and Christian to host and update the plugins list somewhere in the site. Does anyone believe it's worth it?Please vote at http://ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?p=5478&sid=f3535a100f8f49236bad386644046c6b#5478
It would also require the poster to follow strict rules and define the plugin in a specific way (i.e. specific header and contents of the message - plugin name, version, approval status, download link, category and whatever other parameters one may think). And what happens if he ommits a parameter? How an application will be able to check it and what actions should it take if it finds something wrong or missing? IMHO it would be complicated and risky.