[pmwiki-users] PmWiki Extensions discussion

[Petko Yotov]

For the past few months I've been working on the design of a new family 
of PmWiki recipes called "Extensions".

Recently I've been extremely busy -- and still am -- but I believe 
initiating this discussion could help advance the project.

Extensions are PmWiki recipes that should be easy to install, configure, 
and maintain, per PmWiki Philosophy #5.

The main goals are:

- Simpler deployment and updates for webmasters, either from version 
control, or manually, without custom files intermingled with the PmWiki 
core installation (especially feature-rich recipes shipping with CSS, 
JavaScript, icons, fonts, and other resources).

- Easier form-based configuration for wiki administrators, without the 
need to edit PHP scripts.

- Compact structure, version-control friendly, and helper functions to 
streamline extension development and distribution.

- Simpler, maintainable, crowd-sourced internationalization (to do).


This is a work in progress, you can check what has been prototyped so 
far on these pages:

For webmasters and wiki admins:
   https://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/ExtensionHub

For extension authors and maintainers:
   https://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/ExtensionDesign

A few sample extensions ready to be tested:
   https://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Extensions


You are invited to review the above pages and let me know if you see any 
possible improvements, or something I may have missed or forgotten as an 
objective.

Petko

P.S. Classic cookbook recipes will still be supported, the existing core 
interfaces are not deprecated or removed. Extensions are a new possible 
way to write, deploy and configure PmWiki recipes.