New Addon SiteAs our collection of addons has been growing, we wanted to provide better visibility to what is available as well as provide a way for authors to easily add / announce their addon.
What we have done is create a github.io page / site for addons. This will help to organize them in to categories, provide essential details and enable an easier way to find them. The site is created with Jekyll and the Liquid template language, styled with bootstrap. If anyone wants to improve the look feel free to discuss and to make some changes.
Some important things for authors.
- You do not have to upload your addon to the site, you can leave it where it is, be it an attachment, its own Github repo or even a Bitbucket repo. Of course if you desire you can also add it to this repo. What you do is up to you, its your addon after all.
- To add your listing to the site, you must add a "page" that describes your addon, these steps will be detailed in the addons board
- This does not supersede the current board, its simply there to provide additional support to the addon authors and improve the accessibility to our users.
We did attempted to migrate all of the current listing from the addon board to the new site. This means some were probably missed or have some copy / paste errors. Feel free to fork the repo, make your fixes, and send a PR.
When you view the addon site the main page is in chronological order of last updated. You can view addons by category. Selecting a specific addon will bring up the details page which also includes other addons by that author, as well as other addons from that category. There is a basic search capability on the site, limited by what we can do with a static site, but its something at least.
http://addons.elkarte.net should take you to the page, enjoy !
This is AWESOME!!! :D
Spuds you have done a wonderful work!
I guess these:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elkarte/addons/gh-pages/_posts/2013-11-22-Honey-Captcha.md
are the files that generate the addon page, right?
Thanks :D
Yes those are the pages.
Simply update page and commit it back and everything else will take care of itselftm If its a code update then change the date in the file (not the name of the file) and it should float to the top. I'll detail out what the variables in the front matter are in a bit, not in a documentation mood right now :P
Welcome to my usual state! :P
No problem, you already did a lot, you deserve a beer or two! After that documentation comes easier. :P
Great looking site for the addons and much more user friendly then searching through the posts.
It looks AWESOME, however I can still suggest something that could be an improvement.
On the left side you have the menu:
Security
Enhancement
New Feature
Administration
Utility
BBC
Other
Smiley
It would be cool to me if each icon reflected the addon category icon, like the enhancements show up a bell, then the bell could fit in the left menu as well and so on... What do you think? :)
Marvelous. Splendid idea indeed. I just learn to reorganize my github. I will try to update all and push it, how that is and to, wherever that is. ;D
Congrats! You did a great job!!!
I was going to ask if there will be an addon/themes site for elkarte ;)
Not sure if you're a coder, but you can do this yourself and submit a pull request so Spuds and Emanuele don't have to.
Spuds, awesome idea. Great work.
Would it be possible to add the page to the menu here for easier access ;)
@Joshua Dickerson nice to see you are still around... I saw you on sm.org, one of the first members... 39th if I'm not mistaken
I'm not a coder at all, but I'm one hell of a glitcher, bug spotter and good at thinking improvements/mods (I currently have 133 mods installed on my own smf, with many custom edits and 4 themes based on the default that look
radically different) so suggesting is what I can do :)
As a sidenote I don't even have GitHub, never really liked it that much.
Second that request. Under "Community" tab (since it's community-driven) or after new replies, I don't know, up to you guys.
I had to make a few tweaks to the pages, so in doing that I changed the sidebar icons to reflect the category.
The reason I was tweaking some things was that I added a travis CI build process to the gh_pages creation. So now when an updated is pushed all of the links (script, image, url, etc) are automatically validated, so its a quick check that the site built correctly.
I'll see what
@emanuele can do :D :D
/me has still to update the site... :'(
Found a couple of small bugs:
1. see the attachment ("2" is the active page)
2. http://addons.elkarte.net/enhancement/Smart-Title-For-SEO.html
The Support button brings me to the topic if that addon, and I think it's ok because I can download the addon from that topic. The Download button brings me to another mod of ahrasis (HLBM: Highlight Buddy Message)
The download link is right as that thread is the only location that I know of for the addon.
@ahrasis is free to update that to anything he likes :D
The other issue was a copy / paste thing, yes I'm using emanueles excuse, but it fits well here ! I'll fix that in a moment, thanks for the report.
Copy/paste is the best excuse here and always works :)
The link was corrected ;)
=== edit===
another suggestion could be to add the open importer or a link to openimporter ;) what do you think?
OI is not really an addon, but It will get added to the tools repo as well as get linked on the converter area. Long list of todo's ;D
/me wonders if OI should have its own site. O:-)
Maybe "later". lol
It should be under tool section.
TBH, OI is not an ElkArte tool.
It's an independent project by chance developed by people working on ElkArte's code as well. ;)
At least that's how I see it.
And for somewhat completeness
http://themes.elkarte.net is now available as well. If there is stuff missing let us know, or better yet make a PR :D
:happyman:
Good work Spuds :) These sites look really great :D
YAY! Great to see that too! :D
And great to see them all open to contributions and easy to manage!
Added the sites to the menu "home".
What do you think about renaming that button to "Project"?
It does not mean it has to be an ElkArte tool. It is just a tool, a useful one. Put a disclaimer or something would do. :)
I think that makes sense, its the project links, and even the home page is about the project ...
This is true, in fact its a much needed tool. I intend to do some more general cleanup and organization of the ElkArte repos, but I'm kind of burnt out on working with them for the moment and need to work on some other Elk things for a bit O:-)
I was thinking: what if we place an addon here on the site that caches a json file with the likes of each addon and theme (actually two json files) and then we use this file to show the likes on the addons/themes sites?
Thats a cool idea :D
Should be able to have a daily update to those files and then just a touch of JS to the addon/theme html to pull the file in and update the listing. Could even explore doing all "server" side by pushing to the _data directory with the likes counts, that would update the sites html files as well.
Biggest thing may be to decide on a way to link the two lists.
I think that if the support topic is present, and points to elk.net, it is just possible to parse the url, grab the topic id and use it?
That could work nods
The json file here would just be the topic ids and like count for those topics
Wow, nice holiday gift from the Elkarte team. I see SimplePortal is the first mod listed, which makes me wonder how the mods are sorted now. Must be by awesomeness. ;)
Just a few suggestions. These probably apply to themes, too, I'm just referring to the addon site for simplicity.
-Wishlist (let me add mods/themes to a wishlist so I can view/download them later)
--Bookmarks (alternatively, let me bookmark them)
-Notify about updates (when a mod author pushes an update, let me get auto-notified if I've downloaded or bookmarked the mod)
-Link to Documentation (sometimes mod authors provide this in the Github wiki or Support topic post, but a separate link would be nice when browsing the addon site)
-Link the mod author to their Elkarte profile (or their preferred contact page)
-Link to/popup/hover an explanation of licenses for the uninitiated
One final suggestion for the theme site specifically. REQUIRE a full-size resolution image of the theme. Demo sites sometimes go down or don't work, and it'd be better to include a full-size (not a thumbnail or pared-down size) image of the theme for reference so we don't have to install a theme in order to see what it looks like. Maybe this isn't a problem yet, but too many themes on similar (cough) board sites provide only a thumbnail and it's just a waste.
They are sorted by last update, so SP is at the top since I keep finding things I broke in the port O:-)
The interactive things we can do the the site is somewhat limited in that its static, so bookmarks and notifications are not directly possible. The additional links to things can be added easily, docs, author etc. Not sure what else to say on the license stuff, the listing page just shows the license, and the details page provides a link or whatever details the author wants to add. We could llink the OSI icon to the OSI site for more details.
What my longer term plans were/are/tbd/could change/etc is that when you go to the package manager, pacman pulls the current file (small json file) from the addons site and lets you know if any of your installed mods have been updated. This could also be a done in the main ACP section automatically or perhaps via a check for updates button. Anyway just ideas on how to link ElkArte to the addon and themes site so there is a bit of integration.
At some point we will have a more consistent plugin methodology so that pure plugin addons could be a 1 click update as well.
/me likes how that guy thinks. :D
Very Nice. :D
Why not use Elkarte for a wishlist/bookmarks deal? It would require more integration with the forum, yes, but having a forum profile here is handy anyway to have a quick avenue for support.
The other idea sounds good for marking which mods have been updated. It really seems like the package manager should be smarter than it is. ;)
Tremendous work! Terrific!