Tell us the plugins you use
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:
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
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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
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
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.
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.