How to publish a plugin ?
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My first post )
I am about to finish developing a plugin.
According to what I saw in the Plugin Central there is no plugin that provides the functionality that I developed.
Plugin Central: http://docs.notepad-plus-plus.org/index.php/Plugin_CentralWhere can I read or who do I need to contact in order to understand how can I publish my free plugin for everyone to use?
Are there conditions to meet?
What is the process?Thanks :)
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Once you develop a plugin, you are allowed to distribute it as you like. There are no restrictions in place.
That being said, there are a few ways you can allow others to find it. If you’d like it to be listed on the Plugin Central site, it would be best to make an announcement on this forum (see this recent post as an example). Someone that has editing privileges might get around to putting it on that page (although I’m not sure how up-to-date that page is maintained) or you can get an account on that site to edit the page yourself. It is still best to make an announcement on this forum, that way there isn’t just some unheard of plugin that shows up on that page.
If you want your plugin listed in the plugin manager, you can also do that. See this section of the PluginManager website. In short, make an announcement here, get an account on that site, then add it to the list on that site. Keep in mind, it may take several months to show up within the Plugin Manager inside of Notepad++.
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Superb answer!
Thank you for the prompt and detailed reply ! I appreciate it. -
@dail: How long is serveral months more specific?
Some plugin authors have meanwhile developed their own update system, because the plugin manager doesn’t show the updates. In example the XML tools plugin is still listed in the buggy version 2.4.6, but the fixed version is already several months old.
(Or in my case my own plugin which is still not listed yet.)I am a little bit confused about the sense of a plugin manager which manages plugins and their updates, but needs several months until the changes are online (I would rather expect days or weeks). In my opinion it missed the mark when the plugin developers start to implement their own update systems, due to the slow plugin-manager-update-available progress.
Kind Regards
David Gausmann -
I feel the same way; I have my own plugin listed on it.
The way it works, is that the author of the Plugin Manager has to release the updated list of plugins. It is honestly up to him and his schedule how often he does it. Sometimes it’s a few weeks, other times its several months. I believe part of the issue is that every time the list is updated, it is redownloaded alot since everyone running Notepad++ has to get the new list. This file has to be hosted somewhere, and since it is downloaded so much, not many services want to host it for free. I would strongly agree that it is very important to make sure those lists are refreshed as often as possible. I think I recall he posted on the forum a little while back he is looking into working with some service to host the updated list for him, but not sure how much that has progressed. This list has been downloaded over 77million times this year alone. There is also an md5sum that the plugin manager downloads first to see if the list has been updated. This file has been downloaded over 198million times this year. So it is easy to see the bandwidth really adds up, even with small file sizes
Side note: I’ve seen alot of other “plugin managers” for other software (e.g. games, etc) host the list on Github, which I think is a beautiful idea. Just simply create a pull request to add your plugin’s information to the list. But again this goes back to the issue of this single file being downloaded so much. :(
