Why the World Needs Plugin Manager
Ok, that is really conceited. The world doesn’t need Plugin Manager. I do. For the past six months I have poured countless hours into supporting the many plugins I have written for Movable Type; and nine out of the ten help tickets I receive have to do with one thing: installation.
At some point though I realized that I couldn’t keep this up. I was routinely trading off new features for supporting existing customers. I just don’t have the time to do both. So I stopped processing help tickets all together and I just let them pile up.
Note to those who have tried to contact me: I am sorry. I left you high and dry. I just hope the neglect will begin to make sense.
I let the help tickets pile up so that I could turn my attention to finding some way to make installation easier for me, and for every Movable Type developer and user for that matter. And after many hours of work, the answer is finally taking shape. The answer is called “Plugin Manager.”
Plugin Manager was modeled almost entirely upon Firefox’s Extension Manager, an indispensible component to one of the leading browsers today. Firefox’s Extension Manager allows users to install plugins quickly and easily. And when an update is available for a plugin that is already installed, you can quickly install that as well. It takes out all the guess work of what files need to get installed where, what the file permissions should be, and so on and so forth.
Firefox’s Extension Manager does more for making Firefox into a platform that any other single component within Firefox, for it is the component that allows developers to make adoption of their inventions as simple as a single click. If Firefox developers had to guide users through the various platform specific indiosyncracies of installation, there would either be no extension developers, or no extension users.
So stay tuned, Plugin Mana=er is coming. And to whet your appetite, here is a screenshot.
