Improve User Experience and Discoverability with 3rd Party Plugins

[skybaks]

I think there is an opportunity to improve the experience of a user in both discovery and installation of a 3rd-party plugin.

Something fancy might include a addition to the CLI that installs from pip and configures the settings to load the plugin.

Another fancy idea might be a GUI inside the game that allows a server admin to browse plugins from a "shop" or something. Consider like how Openplanet manages its plugins on its website and then provides the in-game plugin manager to handle installation as well as discoverability.
The plugin code hosting could still be done through pypi but maybe developers could submit their package to be added to a list of plugins that would be maintained on a website or even more simply, in the source code.

The simplest possible implementation could just be another page in the online documentation that talks about some of the existing plugins with links to their repos/pypi package.

[TheMaximum]

It would indeed be cool to have an in-game app manager, where you can install third-party apps, enable/disable them, possibly also configure them. Hosting might be best to do via pypi, but we could Git-host a simple json file containing the available apps - on which an app author can make a PR to request their app to be added.

[tomvlk]

https://github.com/PyPlanet/specs.pypla.net
and https://github.com/PyPlanet/Specs

Based on CocaoPods idea: https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs

[skybaks]

Yeah, that looks like a cool way to manage it. Off the top of my head for the specs it might be nice to include:

• path to add to apps.py
• documentation link or file
• source code link
• issue report link
• version

[TheMaximum]

Made a small start with gathering information from an index JSON, pypi and pip.
Might be interesting as a starting point for this implementation.

master...sandbox/app-manager

[skybaks]

Yeah, that looks nice. I didnt know we could get all that data from pypi so easily, that really simplifies what we would need to store in the index file.

In terms of installing or uninstalling plugins, do you think manipulating the apps.py file is the way to handle it or is there possibly a better solution? Do you think it could be possible to add new apps during runtime? Also, what about removing apps at runtime? That might be tricky due to callback registrations

[TheMaximum]

It's pretty cool that you can get all that data from PyPi, it was indeed my intention to keep the amount of data needed in the index-file as low as possible.

I know that @tomvlk is looking to change the way PyPlanet is configurated for 1.0.0, so I don't know whether there will be an apps.py file by then. I would've gone the apps.py route. I'd think adding new apps during runtime should be possible, but I haven't tried that yet. Removing apps might be a bit harder, they should at least all properly implement the on stop method, but I'm not 100% sure you can actually unregister commands/signals and such.