Considering Building An Addon Installer

nevir

New to the Vanilla world, definitely enjoying this forum and the Garden framework!

Anyway, I'm interested in potentially building a plugin installer ...plugin, mostly to fulfill my selfish/lazy needs - but hopefully also a welcome addition to the community :P

The rough idea is that this is a plugin that hooks into the Dashboard app and allows you to browse/install/update plugins without having to deal with downloading/extracting/uploading the addon to your site. I have a few requirements-finding questions I'm curious about, though:

• Are there any other projects like this underway?
• Is this something that you Vanilla admins would be ok with?
• Should I think about ways to keep the discovery process on the Vanilla site to avoid stealing views?

And more technical questions:

• Is there a structured API to the addons database? If not, is that something I can contribute?
• Do addon archives generally follow a certain folder structure, or is there a common one that I can rely on most using? I'd like to avoid having to deal with a bunch of heuristics when trying to figure out where the files should go.

TiGR

There are no rules for addon archive format currently (which is bad). I think that some kind of manifest file would be nice.