System for version compatibility of included plugins

JohanRonstrom

Hello!

Great job on 2.1! A lot of improvements!

I'd like to ask about the bundled plugins in the (stable) releases of Vanilla.

The release of 2.1 seems to include several plugins that is not compatible with Vanilla 2.1. For example the Facebook and Twitter connect plugins, as well as others. This has also been the case with previous (stable) releases of Vanilla.

What is the system for what gets included in the stable releases plugin-wise. Is it smart to bundle plugins at all if the compatibility can't be secured?

I often try to sell in vanilla as the forum of choice to my customers, but this has long been a major hassle that often makes them question the choice ("but it doesn't work!"). This is especially problematic since the facebook plugin is not availiable in the general addon catalog.

How is this step thought of in the dev process? If it is not thought of, I would consider stop bundling plugins at all in the Open Source releases and make them availiable for download in the Addons Library. This could of course be thought out as a "buy a paid plan", but I don't believe that. Thoughts on this?

Regards / JohanR

hgtonight

I am pretty sure this is just oversight. The latest development versions of the bundled plugins might actually require 2.2.

There is a pretty big backporting project happening over on GitHub to re-align the bundled plugins with the OS release, AFAIK.

That said, if you wouldn't mind contributing to our community list here: http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/26703/plugins-themes-that-work-and-don-t-work-in-vanilla-2-1

I would really appreciate it!

JohanRonstrom

Okay, so I'm going to bump this now.

I just installed a completely new version of Vanilla 2.1.9 on a new server, and there are so many issues with the shipped plugins that I have had to spend several workdays to investigate, and have still not got all compatibility issues resolved.

I'm sure I can resolve each problem, but I'm still wondering about the original question above:

"What is the system for what gets included in the stable releases plugin-wise. Is it smart to bundle plugins at all if the compatibility can't be secured?"

My suggestion is to take a serious grip on this, and not release a 2.2 that is called stable before all bundles plugins are compatible with the release of the core. Or just move all plugins to the directory and not bundle them.

If plugin compatibility is something people don't care about in the OpenSource version, I would understand, but it'd be nice to know what "stable" means.

Thanks!

hgtonight

My understanding, as an outside developer, is Vanilla Inc. is forming (slowly) much tighter integration standards that will be vastly improved with 2.2 as 2.2 has a few different core components that are causing the incompatibility.

This sucks, for sure. I am confident things will get better.

If you want to directly help the OS community here, please report your issues and file pull requests where needed. Together we can make the interim suck less.

Bleistivt

The core plugins should be compatible with the core version and working. I would expect a lot more issues being reported if they weren't.

The plugins in the addons repository here are a different story though, there are definitely compatibility issues.

"Stable" in software doesn't mean it won't crash or has a low level of bugs necessarily. It just means that it doesn't change in terms of functionality and API.