Extensions categories and icons

bic

I was wondering why the extensions are only Official or Unsupported. Is there a reason for that?
It's may be possible to organize them like is done for themes

Officially supported theme*
Generally compatible (3rd party)
Partly compatible (3rd party)
Currently not compatible (3rd party)
No longer provided (3rd party)

That red icon beside 3rd party plugin is quite discouraging I suppose, especially for new users of Zenphoto.

acrylian

Lacking time and resources actually.

Because we have fewer themes than extensions (40 vs 204 at the moment) we can check them roughly from time to time which is quite easily enabling them and looking for intital errors

Some of the hosted ones we even do maintain roughly which is why those are "generally compatible".
But they won't get all the new features.

We really have no resource to try all the plugins which is much more difficult to try. There for they are either supported or not. Some are that old that they probably don't even work anymore.

There is actually a difference in "unsupported" that is not show. It has three sub categories:
- unsupported plugins on github (plugins we did but choose not to include)
- unsupported misc on githib (other tools that are no real plugins as of above)
Those one are roughly maintained sometimes and are meant as starting points for example.
- unsupported plugins selfhoste (the real 3rd party plugins the authors are responsible of)

(We have also a few dev plugins that are specifically for our use in the github dev repo that are not listed on the site at all).

I agree we probably should at least differ between those like on the themes. I will look at that.

If you like to volunteer to check the last category, feel free...;-)

acrylian

Since I did a few things behind the scene anyway I made a quick update and replace the discouraging red exclamantion mark with the orange question mark. Also I introduced a blue question marks for the hosted stuff and updated the descriptins in the sidebar

bic

Thanks for the detailed explanation above, I understand and I can help testing some of the plugins of course, though there could be a more effective way to control the whole thing.
May be it's possible to involve 3th party developers, still active on their plugins, in maintaining the descriptions updated, giving them some edit rights somewhere in this site, just to tell other people that a plugin is still compatible with current version of Zenphoto. May be you can add a sort of automatic "category downgrade" for the plugins, based on last edit timestamp of their description pages here.
Don't know if this is easily achievable, but I think that it could help the community to grow up, and stimulate external developers to work on it.
If anybody has other ideas and suggestion, please join this discussion.

PS
The orange question mark looks better then the red exclamation mark indeed!

acrylian

I have thought about giving 3rd party developers rights to their own items as well. We will discuss this later (sbillard is a bit away currently). Actually Zenphoto could handle that right away.

We would really appreciate if you could do some tests on the 3rd party stuff. You can mail me directly if you like (you should see an address on github and we also have adresses on zenphoto.org with the forum user name). Maybe you like to become involved as a kind of chief tester anyway given the recent reports?..:-)

bic

I will be glad to help, my only concern is about constance. I have many things to do for my work and I change very often my interests and hobbies. But I can try and see if I'm able to guarantee a reliable collaboration.

PS
I didn't find your address on GitHub, and your nick at zenphoto.org returned a bad destination mailbox address. Can I try with the address found in your site?

acrylian

OK, thanks. We are appreaciate any contribution but of course would prefer if someone could constantly (we don't mean 24/7 of course..:-)) We often encounter users that just do what they need at the moment and then disappear. That is of course okay. But that also lead to our strict rule regarding 3rd party stuff and only on exceptions to take over stuff. We put that older stuff there as an archive so people may use it as a starting point.

I thought on Github the commit address is public. Anyway, you can use the from my "site" as well.

Sorry, the zenphoto.org one is not the nick but the real name (without surname). Forgot as we have those only for few weeks now.