

JQuery Shutters Plugin Site - vital101
http://plugins.jquery.com/

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dmethvin
Let me give you a little background on this, I'm on the jQuery Board and a
member of the core team.

A new jQuery plugins site isn't too far away. We should have a blog post up in
the next few days with the details, I won't steal the thunder but the new site
will discourage spam, promote plugins with higher quality, and provide a
consistent way for users to report/discuss bugs.

> Wouldn't it be better to open the new plugin site then close the old one?

Yeah that was our goal. In cleaning up spam on the old site we got a bit
overeager and decided it wouldn't make sense to leave the broken remains.

> It would be great for the end user and plugin authors if they (jquery.com)
> curates the plugins themselves.

Most of us are volunteering our time to the jQuery project. If you are
agreeable to the same pay scale, you can be one of us and help curate the new
plugins site. Get your company to give you 20%-time.

~~~
stevoyoung
I would volunteer to help curate the plugins. However, to be clear, I didn't
necessarily mean manually curate them. You all can simply create a mechanism
for the community to curate them (vote up/down, track number of downloads,
reviews etc). When I said you all aka jquery.com, I simply meant that it will
be controlled on your domain - not that you have to give more of your time.

With that being said, thank you for giving your time freely to help grow the
community. I think I speak for most when I say, I appreciate it.

~~~
nerfhammer
A site that has good curation of a large number of small, useful code
snippets: <http://phpjs.org/>

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windsurfer
If I was to create a jQuery plugin site, I would make it a "shopping cart"
system where you can pick and choose all the (curated) plugins you want and
the site will package it all in a nice zip, provide you with a snippet of code
to run it properly, and optionally give you a (paid) hosting of the customized
code on a CDN. It could eventually have paid plugins available for further
monetization.

~~~
sarenji
I agree. When I wanted to make a new jQuery plugin site (until this post!), I
planned on being able to view the plugin source online, like on GitHub. Aside
from viewing the code and its quality immediately, it would also let us copy-
paste plugins that are just one .js file. It's a bit bothersome to have a .zip
in that case.

~~~
latchkey
Actually, that is a great idea... why not just make a site that links
everything to github? The plugin pages could just be github pages and
downloads. Issue tracking? github. Pull requests. github. Makes perfect sense
to me.

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brokentone
I've been disappointed by the quality of many of the plugins listed on the
site for a while. I often have to rely on plugins I have used before, read of
on HN in the past, or ask other developers--rather than going to the plugins
page. Granted the plugins I end up using are also in the list I would have
seen, there is nothing separating them from the really bad ones.

I wonder if the number of bad plugins comes from the relatively small
disparity between being able to use jQuery and writing a plugin. jQuery's
whole premise is being an easy to use programming language. In other models
(wordpress for example) the bottom 50% (or more, I don't know, I'm just making
up numbers) of "administrators" would have no idea how to make a plugin.
Verses the bottom 15% (again completely fake numbers, just for demonstration)
of jQuery users may be unable to do so.

~~~
code_duck
A jQuery 'plugin' can be written in one line... the level of functionality one
might provide is much lower than the minimum functionality found in a
WordPress plugin.

~~~
dangrossman
A WordPress plugin can be just one line too. There used to be a very popular
one whose only job was to disable the WordPress filter that turned line breaks
into paragraph tags.

    
    
        <?php remove_filter('the_content', 'wpautop'); ?>

~~~
code_duck
Aha, good point. So there isn't really any skill difference between the
minimum jQuery plugin and the minimum WordPress plugin.

~~~
brokentone
Right, but my point was of the difference in disparity between the minimum
plugin and minimum usage. To use jQuery is closer to creating a plugin than
using wordpress is to creating a plugin.

~~~
code_duck
Is that what you should be comparing, though? I think there's an impedance
mismatch between WordPress and jQuery. WordPress is not seen primarily as a
programming tool.

'Using' jQuery could mean visiting a website that employs jQuery which doesn't
bring you any closer to writing anything. What we mean is people who program
with jQuery, though.

The average WordPress user (say, an author or site owner) doesn't do any
programming at all. A user who does do programming, like someone who
customizes WordPress for people, could write one of these one line plugins.
Ultimately it's comparing JavaScript to PHP, and I don't think one is more
difficult.

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stevoyoung
Finally. It would be great for the end user and plugin authors if they
(jquery.com) curates the plugins themselves. I'm sure a lot more exploration
will happen on their site vs scouring the web. I know I've never relied on
their old plugin site to find anything.

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Egregore
Wouldn't it be better to open the new plugin site then close the old one?

~~~
lukifer
I agree with this. Perhaps there was a technical or security reason for taking
the current one down, but barring that, don't take away the old thing until
there's a new thing to take its place.

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malandrew
I would rather they defer the handling of plugins to Github. The social
features of Github makes it easy to evaluate what plugins are popular among
respected developers. Github also encourages contribution to an existing
plugin as opposed to creating two dozen plugins that all do the same thing.

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alexyoung
My preferred solution is Ender (<http://ender.no.de/>) and searching sites
like GitHub.

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netaustin
If I remember right, the jQuery plugins site was one of the only other open-
source repositories powered by the Drupal Project module
(drupal.org/project/project) besides drupal.org itself. I think that jQuery
might even have been running the Drupal 5 version. The Project module, which
they'd have to either fix or dig out of, is a massive chunk of code. Upgrading
to Drupal 6 would be painful, and finding people who have the knowledge and
desire to hack on the Drupal 5 version would probably be really tough.

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phzbOx
Please forgive me, but I'll use this post to ask a question I've been
wondering for a while. Is it better to use a minified js/css of _all pages of
the website_ or to make each pages as minimal as possible? For instance, if I
use 4 jquery plugins on a splash page, 2 jquery plugins in the "signup" part
and 5 other jquery plugins a little bit everywhere.. should I bundle all these
plugins into one big .js, minified it and put it on the splash page so that it
is cached?

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
It depends on how big it all is when it comes together.

For example, you'll have 7 plugins (and associated code that runs them) that
won't be used at all on the splash screen. That's going to increase load-time
when someone hits that page.

If someone hits a page direct and avoids the splash screen, it's not going to
be cached in the first place so it'll all be loaded. Only this time they're
loading 4 plugins and the related code that won't even be used.

IMO you should compress what's needed for each page. Several smaller downloads
is often better than one large download, and you shouldn't be relying on a
user's cache to gauge your own site's performance. If you're not going to use
it, don't include it.

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LocalPCGuy
I believe this is a good thing. I jQuery daily, and when searching for a
plugin lately I would avoid the plugins site when it came up in search
results. It was outdated and the stuff in there isn't generally well
maintained. I was glad to hear about a new plugin site coming (it was
announced at jqcon in Oct I believe) and see this as a positive move towards
that being live.

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nicwest
What's the advantage of shuttering a site over just leaving the existing site
running and developing a new one behind the scenes?

~~~
drhowarddrfine
Getting a bad reputation from the spam it has been encountering apparently.

~~~
skrebbel
Good move. Reputation is far more important than people getting easy access to
useful tools.

Don't get me wrong - it's their fair right to shut down a site they own. It's
just highlighting a particular set of priorities they seem to have.

~~~
shantanubala
Think of it this way: what if someone new to jQuery (although jQuery is almost
like a household name to us, there are a lot of people new to web development)
wanted some plugins? They would look at the page on the jQuery web site, and
they would see spam. This is bad for new users, and especially bad for the
jQuery community as a whole if they wind up using buggy or outdated plugins.
By contrast, an experienced person who's already been using jQuery is probably
just going to go on Github or do their own searching. There's no tangible
benefit to keeping it around.

The question you really have to ask: how useful is the plugin page? From my
experience, it's pretty useless. A newbie will find most of the widgets they
need (with high-quality code) in the jQuery UI/Mobile projects, and there are
tons of authoritative blog posts if they do a little bit of searching.

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mwsherman
Maybe a third-party curated site like rubygems.org would be better.

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JangoSteve
This certainly is interesting timing. I've been dissatisfied with
plugins.jquery.com for quite a while. Earlier this year, I began development
of an entirely new site for hosting javascript packages (including but not
limited to jquery plugins (after all, jquery plugins are nothing but normal
javascript code with a dependency on jquery)).

As of last week, that site is finally up and ready for beta. I was planning on
announcing it this week or next.

If anyone here on HN has a jquery plugin or any other opensource javascript
library or framework, and would like to give some feedback, please let me know
via twitter or email (see my HN profile for both). The more people that can
test it out privately, the better I'll feel launching it :-)

EDIT: Also, I plan on completely open-sourcing the site itself, like Github
has done, once the site is launched.

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DiabloD3
Misleading headline, it is only temporarily closed.

I assume it was effecting their Google rank, otherwise they would have left
the old one open.

~~~
sk3tch
It's not misleading; it says 'shutters' not 'shut'. As in how you'd close a
shop overnight by pulling the shutters down..

~~~
dalke
Not only that, but the linked to page also says "shutters."

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ayush_gupta
+!

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ggwicz
Although WordPress' repo uses SVN (I prefer Git), it runs really smoothly.
Something like that would be great for jQuery, but you wouldn't need the whole
update feature set.

