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Tell us the plugins you use by Fabien Potencier – April 07, 2009 – 20 comments

Today, the symfony community celebrates the 500th symfony plugin, published on the official symfony plugin repository. That's a great achievement. But what about the quality of all these plugins? We are facing a big challenge here, as the quality of a plugin cannot be determined easily. It means that, as a developer, you need to spend a lot of time selecting plugins that are stable, documented, tested, and well maintained.

This issue has been discussed again and again on the symfony development mailing-list; some people want a rating system (à la web 2.0), and some others want a more "objective" measurement of the quality. Some time ago, we decided to first implement a simple system where developers can simply indicate the plugins they use for their projects. The reasoning behind this simple feature is that if a lot of users are using a plugin, it probably means that it solves a common problem pretty well.

To celebrate the 500th plugin, I am happy to announce the immediate availability of this feature. As I have just deployed the feature, no wonder that plugins have no user yet: and as such, the feature is not yet useful as a choice criteria. But if all symfony developers take the time to sign-in and flag the plugin they use on a daily basis, I'm confident we will have a very interesting picture of the most used plugins very fast.

On a side note, I posted an article a few weeks ago on my personal blog about the growth of the number of published plugins. Interesting enough, the growth of the number of plugins started to accelerate after the release of the new plugin system we introduced last year, with about 30 new plugins per month:

Plugin growth rate

UPDATE: More than 600 people registered the symfony plugins they use for their projects in less than 12 hours. Thanks to everybody! As we already have a lot of data, I have updated the plugins homepage with a new "Most popular" plugin list.

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Comments

#1 j0k3r said on the 2009/04/07 at 23:27

Somtimes, it doesn't work, like here : http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/swToolboxPlugin/i_use_it
#2 Ally said on the 2009/04/07 at 23:30

This is a great feature, and it'll certainly help identify the top plugins. It is certainly more useful than a rating system.

I have only one problem! Just last night I was working myself through all 400 of the plugins, assessing each one of them. I only got to page 4 of the results, and planned to evaluate the rest tonight / tomorrow. Now that they are ordered by users, I cannot now work my way through the rest of the list.

Is it possible that you can add a "sort by" field, with the options:

most used
most recently added
most recently updated
ordered by name a - z

also a asc/desc flip

I promise to mark all the plugins I use regularly in return :o)

Many thanks,

Ally
#3 Russ said on the 2009/04/07 at 23:31

My login works for Trac, the forum and wiki but not on the plugin page... is this a different login?
#4 Thomas R. said on the 2009/04/08 at 00:10

@j0k3r: I guess I forgot to generate the package file ...
#5 Tom Boutell said on the 2009/04/08 at 01:07

Great stuff. Thank you Fabien.
#6 ice_j7 said on the 2009/04/08 at 02:29

Great feature, already voted for the plugins I used!
#7 Stephen Ostrow said on the 2009/04/08 at 03:58

I am as well getting the same issue with some plugins that j0k3r is getting.

Also, can we get a listing page under the my account section which shows all plugins where are being use. It sort of goes along the lines of this which I suggested a while back:
http://trac.symfony-project.org/ticket/4601
#8 Pablo said on the 2009/04/08 at 03:59

it will be interesting to see some stats about plugin usage in a few weeks.
#9 AvidSymfonyUser said on the 2009/04/08 at 04:42

Maybe I am the only who wants this, but I would use more plugins if they were more accessible via the builtin PEAR feature that is part of symfony. My experience is that if it is not made for symfony 1.1 or 1.2, it will not upload the program. Therefore, I have to go through the process of using svn to get the code. For some, this maybe trivial. However, for me, it would be a significant help since I would have one place to upload all of my plugins, regardless of version.
#10 AvidSymfonyUser said on the 2009/04/08 at 04:47

Also, it would help if the more plugins would be ORM-independent. Propel plugins outnumber Doctrine plugins. An ORM-independent philosophy would give people choice on which ORM they want to use since each have their own strengths and weaknesses. It would even open the door for users to use other lesser-known ORM libraries.
#11 Daniele said on the 2009/04/08 at 11:10

Great stuff. This is a simple but most useful aid in order to discover new helpful plugins. Thank you Fabien!
#12 COil said on the 2009/04/08 at 13:33

Nice feature. It would be cool to have another page that would list all plugins ordered by this count. :) Because when there will be a lot of data perhaps the 10th most popular plugin will get 89 votes and the 11h 88 votes.. but this last one will not be visible, witch would be quiet unfair.
#13 fabien said on the 2009/04/08 at 14:39

@j0k3r: fixed
#14 Fabien said on the 2009/04/08 at 15:16

@COil: done
#15 Gert said on the 2009/04/09 at 10:04

Thanks Fabien, for this great feature!

With over 500 plugins in the system, wouldn't it be nice to search in descriptions as well? Not all plugin names are very descriptive.
#16 Fabien said on the 2009/04/10 at 08:59

@Stephen Ostrow: I have just added a "my stack" link to the plugin account box. It gives you a list of the plugins you use.
#17 Stephen Ostrow said on the 2009/04/11 at 00:28

@Fabien: Thanks
#18 Sebastien said on the 2009/04/12 at 22:36

I'd like to know how you did your chart, is it a php library or a client-side software? How is it called?
#19 Fabien said on the 2009/04/13 at 07:11

@Sebastien: plain old excel ;)
#20 Pablo said on the 2009/04/27 at 23:43

Im late here, but can we add something like the debian uses to make the cds?

Basically apt (we will probably use a task, invoked manually please, not automatic) submits a list of the packages (plugins) used in a system (project), the versions and the symfony version as well.