Core Plugin Infrastructure
As many of you know, last Thursday’s dev chat resulted in a core plugins research team team (for lack of a better term). Basically, our job is to try to come up with a list of tools that should be supplied for all core plugins, in order to allow teams of developers to be effective and efficient. It’s only been a few days so far, but we wanted to update everyone on our progress.
First, we started a new IRC channel on freenode to discuss core plugins. If you’re interested in offering suggestions or ideas, share them in #wordpress-core-plugins. The channel is logged at https://irclogs.wordpress.org/ as well, so feel free to put your ideas there even if no one is presently chatting. I’m sure a few of us will look at the logs (I know I do).
We also started discussing the infrastructure that is needed. It seems that plugins already have a good SVN system in place, which is great. Additionally we think core plugin teams need trac (which we already have, but it needs some work), and mailing lists. The way we see it, core plugins should have most of the tools available to WordPress core developers, since they’ll be doing the same basic thing on a smaller scale.
There’s still a lot to do, including coming up with suggestions on how core plugins should be developed, how developers will be added to or removed from a core plugin team, figuring out if any of the tools or processes would benefit all plugins (not just core plugins), etc. We’d love to get more input on these areas, either here or in #wordpress-core-plugins. Please remember though that we aren’t discussing what core plugins should be called, whether or not they’re a good idea, how plugins will become core plugins, or whether my mom’s a core plugin. We’re just trying to come up with a set of tools that would help the developers, and some basic best-practices for plugin development and team building.
Dan Cole 10:45 pm on January 11, 2010 Permalink
How about considering letting each core plugin have it’s own Trac or be in a core plugin Trac. Plugin Trac works, but it has a lot of noise from the other 7,000 plugins. I think it would be nice to filter content for people. The current plugin Trac seams overwhelming until you get use to it and filter data. I’d assume people are Trac novices. It would also give developers more features, e.g. they could add components or create roadmaps. I like the idea of a core plugin being like core development, but on a smaller scale.
aarondcampbell 11:27 pm on January 11, 2010 Permalink
The goal will be to use the existing trac, so that all plugins can benefit from it. However, we do need to see what we can do as far as good filters to allow you to see only what you really want to see, so we’ll try to make that process a lot easier.
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Andreas Nurbo 5:31 pm on January 13, 2010 Permalink
You should look into how RubyOnRails handles things. And also study GitHub.
Better docs is also required if you want to improve stuff.
A core dev cant replace good “best practice” articles as seems to have been suggested in wp corepse chat session. If you want all plugins to benefit from this endeavor you need better articles etc. Looking at core code and design decisions overtime core devs are not some coding gods.
John James Jacoby 10:40 pm on January 13, 2010 Permalink
There’s been talk about trying to make a collaborative plugin for BuddyPress, to help group users together and let people “buddy up” with mentors and protege’s to help deliver the best quality code possible. I’d love to help out on something like this.
Andreas Nurbo 11:31 pm on January 13, 2010 Permalink
I would be interested to help out with that. Good learning opportunity. I’m in the process of learning BuddyPress inside out since I’m gonna convert a community based on a old c#/asp.net CMS I wrote. Looks like I need to write plugins for BP in the process also.
Dan 3:09 am on November 13, 2010 Permalink
I agree with Andreas. Definitately take notes from the Rails community and Git! SVN way outdated when compared to Git.