Auto Install Challenge
A few days ago we saw a release of version 1.3.1 for Mango Blog. What is particularly awesome about this release is that it takes it up a notch adding features not found in other major blogging software. In particular mango blog now has a new system for auto installing plugins. No longer will you need to FTP a plugin to your site. Simply copy and paste the url for the plugin into your admin and viola! The plugin is copied to your server, decompressed, installed, and activated all in one shot! That is slick!
Although I think this feature is totally slick, I think it can be made even easier yet. Here are my thoughts. I hope that one you fine developers see this as a challenge and decides to take it on. Or you can tell me that I am crazy and to take a long walk off a short pier. Either way I want action! Then I digress. Okay, so here are my thoughts. Since plugins are hosted by the individual developers and not by mangoblog.org there needs to be a way to simplify the auto install experience to another degree. One thought would be to develop something like a firefox extension that allows you to harness the power of the Mango Blog API to add the link directly to your admin area. The next idea would require the developer to use javascript in the linkage to the plugin archive to automatically send the plugin url your mango admin.
My last idea and probably the most feasible one, would involve setting up a system that would allow developers to ping the mangoblog.org site when a plugin is released or updated. This allows mango blog to act as a central location for all the plugins available for mango blog. This central repository then acts as a hub for all the mango plugins moving forward. Similar to the way the overview page displays a notice for a new version of mango blog. The system could then display a message for those plugins that have updates available and offer the option to auto install the new plugin. Taking this a step further, users could then be given an option in the plugins admin to view what plugins are available for mango blog and install those that they need.
Taking the whole idea one more step into the future, mango might offer the same functionality for other areas of the system for example themes that could be automatically installed from the admin area. After all the code has already been written to some degree for themes offered through the mango blog site.
Thoughts? Ideas? Public Flaming? What are your thoughts?
Tags: ColdFusion · Mango Blog
4 comments so far ↓
It's not really practical to have a link from an external site which launches into the admin, because it would have to know what the address of your Mango admin is.
However, your second idea is one that I'm already intending to put into practice, just as soon as I have the time!
A centralised repository of plugins is definitely the way to go. As well as being a site where you could browse the various plugins, there would also be a web service which would enable a plugin browser within the Mango admin, much like the current theme browser. You could then simply click a link to install that plugin.
As soon as I've got started on it, I'll post more about it.
An alternative might be to have the plugin XML specify an update location. For example, it could download the project info XML from RIAForge to get the current version number, and if greater than the current version, use the RIAForge download URL to get the latest zip file. For people who don't host their plugins on RIAForge, they could manually maintain a text file with the current version and the update URL.
You know I talked with you about this. At this point, I already have (most of) the architecture in place to have a central repository for plugins and their updates. I have the list of plugins and their URLs in the plugin list in the main site, and I have the auto-install. I just need now to put them together ;)
I like your ideas for auto-pinging, etc. Eclipse updater does something like that where plugin creators have a URL where you check for updates.
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