Item2397: Create a proposal for the uniform presentation of extensions

As discussed at the summit, extensions need to uniformly display:

• an introduction what the extension is about ("what's in it for me")
• target group of the extension
• a picture (proposal: diagram if a picture does not make sense)
• if possible a screencast
• if possible a rating mechanism

If all extension info pages have the same setup, scanning and choosing becomes much easier.

-- ArthurClemens - 22 Nov 2009

The main purpose is to make comparing extensions easier. At a minimum we can define that the extension topic includes a title, description and screenshot at the top.

I have created a INCLUDE block to be used for extensions, defined in Extensions.Extensions.

To use it, an extension topic adds 3 table rows to the topic, for example:

Title:	Personal Info AddOn
Description:	User personalisation and user search tool.
Image file:	userpage.png

and puts this at the top of the topic:

%INCLUDE{"Extensions" section="intro" warn="If you see this message, you are missing a topic 'Extensions'.<br />To fix this: log in as admin, create a topic [[%SCRIPTURL{edit}%/%SYSTEMWEB%/Extensionx?nowysiwyg=1][Extensions]] and paste in the text of http://foswiki.org/Extensions/Extensions?raw=on. Save the topic and return here."}%

This results in:

Personal Info AddOn

User personalisation and user search tool.

[end of example]

Things that I hope can be improved but I don't know how:

1. Older installations will not have the System.Extensions topic, hence the elaborate warning.
2. Using the regex with SEARCH makes it very hard to create an overview topic with images. I have spent several hours on this and have discarded it.

On a more fundamental level, I am not sure if this complexity counterweights the benefits. After all, we are asking extension developers to add 2 things to the page, while the building blocks are already available in some way (perhaps less structured).

And the main work is still to be done: to create easy to scan (perhaps filter) extension overviews. As I wrote, using the regex search pattern this will be very hard. For foswiki.org we might need to add an extra form field for the image.

-- ArthurClemens - 19 Dec 2009

I guess it will be easier on users if the system feels similar to the extension sites of Mozilla and Chrome, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ and http://www.chromeextensions.org/ A simple search in the summary should be sufficient, but I think tagging - and rating? -should be very useful too.

-- ColasNahaboo - 19 Dec 2009

The problem is that we distribute extension topics, and use the same topics on foswiki.org (with some form fields added). If we add a form field with image, that image cannot be used automatically in a distributed topic. We are dealing with a subset with limited functionality.

The proposal above is a way to add some structure to the extension topic, but falls short because:

• we cannot add structured info without a data form
• cannot access data in a table (at least not without a plugin)
• cannot write and read meta data so easily (at least not without a plugin)

-- ArthurClemens - 19 Dec 2009

In an ideal world, a way of doing InlineTopicContentAsMeta would make this (and many other problems I would like to solve in Foswiki) a trivial exercise:

• Named sections could become searchable/extractable as metadata fields already are. Requires working on ContentAccessSyntax to be able to come up with a query syntax that allows us to address parts of a topic.
• Or we could make a new markup syntax that would hopefully satisfy HereDocumentSyntaxForMacros too.

Developing either of these approaches would further narrow down on some sort of spec for the TopicObjectModel.

... in the meantime...

we could extend BuildContrib to automatically populate the PackageForm ImageUrl along with new fields such as ShortDescription from some variables like * Set IMAGEURL and the existing * Set SHORTDESCRIPTION variable.

Plugin authors will of course need to modify their system topics to take advantage of the new IMAGEURL and friends.

This will make turning the foswiki.org/Extensions web into something closer resembling the Firefox add-ons site a lot easier.

-- PaulHarvey - 20 Dec 2009

Closing for inactivity.

-- MichaelDaum - 13 Sep 2011