The future of Typo sidebar plugins

A French translation is avaliable on my personal blog

Between 4.0 and 4.1, there were lots of changes in Typo sidebar plugins architecture. Plugins have been rewriten to become basic rails plugins one can install with script/plugin install {#PLUGIN_SOURCE_URI}. This is aimed at removing some sidebr plugins from the trunk and create an official Typo plugin repository.

Why should we do this? After all, the more functionality you have in a program, the better it is, isn’t it ?

Well, this is not always true. Here are the 4 main reasons :

  • Typo is somewhat heavy for what it does, and too many plugins is part of the issue.
  • People need to wait for a Typo release every time a service changes its API. This won’t happen anymore. We just fix the plugin and users can update.
  • I don’t think users use both Delicious AND Magnolia. And I wonder how much people really use the xbox card stuff. If code is not used, it doesn’t need to be there.
  • We want to give plugin authors some visibility. The repository and plugin directory will help this.

Here is the plugin list we’re going to keep in the trunk :

  • Archives. This one will be activated in the default install.
  • Amazon. It may seem odd to keep it, but it’s the best example we have of interaction between a Typo text filter and a sidebar plugin.
  • Categories. Activated in the default install.
  • Recent comments
  • Static. A Typo developers blogroll will keep being activated by default.
  • Tags.
  • XML syndication. Activated in the default install.

We’re starting moving the less used plugins tonight, with Audioscrobbler and Xbox Live. The whole change will be done step by step before the next release.

We know that it may break blogs using the trunk, just like this one or my own blog, and some people will complain. Please, before doing so, remember that running off the trunk is always at your own risk.

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 19:51 Posted in

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  1. By Tim Connor 17/04/2007 at 23h03


    Sweet and awesome. This might end up making a bunch of my manual typo optimizations unnecessary.

  2. By RedRoot 21/04/2007 at 04h36


    Thank you, good news… Will test on dreamhost.com

  3. By Screwt-K 14/06/2007 at 11h02


    Can’t post any commemts, dunno why guys ….

  4. By Obfuscator 20/12/2007 at 23h41


    Than typo it is better wordpress, besides language?

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