I started working on another extensions site, that would have search, and track multiple versions of extensions. The plan is for it to be integrated into the IDEs, but I haven’t heard from Graham or the IDE developers or the extension librarian in quite a while. (And so I haven’t worked on it myself in quite a while.) But maybe the community should just use and publicise it itself.
If anyone else is a node developer I’d appreciate other people working on it!
Moving forward on that (the new extensions site) would be directly valuable to the I7 community, even without IDE integration.
I know it sounds like “we have three extensions sites now, let’s solve this problem by creating a fourth.” But if it is complete (for users of both old and new I7 releases), then it would be a great improvement over the current situation.
(on preview, zarf has said a bunch of this more concisely, as usual)
Hey Dannii,
This was actually something that I had in mind as a model for what we could do–or maybe that someone on the team was working on. (I’m not quite sure who’s on the team.) I think this would be a great thing for us to keep going on with, but maybe it would be better if it didn’t have to be coordinated with Graham and the IDE developers.
In particular, I think that rather than try to integrate it with the IDE, it would be good to have it work as a landing page, so someone who visited it would be able to do something like: Find an extension hosted there; quickly tell which extensions were updated for which releases; and get links to some of the other places to find extensions, possibly including the official/old site and the repositories. It’d definitely be great to have something that’s easier for the end-user than Github.
It’d also be nice if this could somehow have a role in coordinating work on updating extensions–in particular ones like Flexible Windows and Disambiguation Control which are pretty widely popular and which break with every update–but that might be too much to ask.
In fact, now that I think of it, maybe one approach to what I was talking about earlier would be, instead of asking for the keys to the official site, to make an unofficial fan site sort of thing with a guide to the official site. This could do things like give links to the best parts of the official site (in particular: warn people against the legacy extension site), host the updated-for-Sierra code, host extensions, provide some of the bugfixes that we can have, etc. Insofar as I see some of the real problems for newbies as coming from the website not staying up to date, we could provide a friendlier place to point them to. (And by “we” I, er, mean you. I don’t even know what a node developer is, really.)
I hear what you’re saying here, but I guess this isn’t my experience of what happens with the bugs when I7 doesn’t get updated for a while. It seems like the newest versions of I7 usually address all the bugs–at least Graham aspires to clear them all–so the debt gets wiped clean every cycle. But also, some critical extensions (thinking of Flexible Windows and Disambiguation Control again) get broken with the updates, because they depend on low-level code that gets changed with the updates. Which at least for Disambiguation Control I guess comes down to technical debt from the parser code being so finicky–but that seems like something that’ll never be discharged.
I’m not sure if there’s a moral I think I can draw from that.
This is excellent, although the typeface seems rather large to me (nitpick), but overall it looks excellent. I’d also consider using a Lucene engine and the search bar enabling auto-type searches (show result as the user types).
Is it ready for extension authors to add their extensions? If so, how would we do that?
I can’t remember exactly how far I got towards allowing everyone to add their own extensions - I think that isn’t enabled yet.
But what I can do is add people to the list of “editors”, who are able to add updates to everyone’s extensions. I don’t want to add everyone to this list of course, but bg, matt w, David are all people I’d be very happy to add. If you PM me a preferred Google account (does not need to be a gmail address) then I’ll add you. (In the future adding other OAuth 2.0 options would be possible.)
It needs the built in extensions from 6M62 added too. And ideally then all the extensions from the other sites.
David, the site is using Bootstrap CSS because I’m not a great designer, so that’s where the default font size comes from. I think it’s okay, but would be very happy for a skilled designer to give the site a facelift. Lucene could be good too. It’s using PostgreSQL currently, but it could be migrated to another system. It also has very limited AJAX, just for autotype results for tags - I stuck with a simple web Express site because I was learning as I was going. If anyone else wanted to commit to working on the site and wanted to transform it into a React or Angular or Vue site I’d be very happy. Or indeed to switch to something other than Node! But as with most things in the IF world, people with the time and expertise to commit are the limiting factor. I probably can’t commit much time in the near future towards it.
Perhaps as part of the Public Library in the IDE (or the website?) there could be a link to an interface for “Experimental User Extensions” with a warning that these extensions are not formally tested and are updated frequently, and to use at the author’s own risk?
(With no shade to extension authors as these extensions usually work as intended, but might sometimes be case-specific, temporary updates, or someone’s personal kludges which are not completely documented… 
)
I think this is a great idea–or we could have a link to the place that they are hosted (Github or whatever). And I definitely think that this is something that we should plan as part of the website Dannii’s working on–this definitely seems to be a case where it’s better to get out ahead of the official IDE/website team rather than try to coordinate with them. Maybe if we make something really nice they’ll want to make it official somehow.
Also, I think we should probably start a new thread on this, as it’s got pretty far afield from the original post. (This probably is mostly my fault.)
Thank you!
I put my votes in today. As I’d like to have the Inform 7 compiler on Android.