Are there guidelines/requirements for plugin title link in plugin section of options panel?

Are there guidelines/requirements for plugin title link in plugin section of options panel? Because I just noticed that the link that is the title of one of the the plugins in Tools>Options>Plugins takes me to a personal (albeit tech related) blog. To me it seems like it should be a requirement that it go to either the plugin's thread here or a github page, or a least a web page related to the plugin.

Which plugin is it? The "homepage_url" field should indeed be a link to the plugin documentation or for example a forum thread related to the plugin.

The author is free to put whatever they want though, although it's not really in their interest to put a random link since they'll lose users that way. Better put a link related to the plugin and, from there, links to personal blogs, donation links, etc.

Codemirror line numbers.

I think I've said this before... If Joplin hopes to attract and keep non-tech users, in my opinion it would be good to put some requirements on the plugin developers. I don't think requiring that the link go to documentation is onerous. If developers are not interested in their plugins being used by the general public, then they shouldn't put them in the official repository.

Thinking about several years down the line, who knows if people's personal web pages will still exist. And the first post in the plugin thread here becomes out of date very quickly. I still think that a structured readme.md file that popped up when you clicked on that link makes the most sense (a la wordpress plugings). Then that readme could (at the dev's option) link to the forum thread, github repository, personal blog, grandmother's wedding photos, or whatever. :smile:

Just my semi-non-tech opinion. I'll try not to bring it up again.

BTW, when I do the plugin search, that title link doesn't do anything. I can make a bug report for that if you need me to.

What you say is reasonable, but it would require us to check the homepage field, the content of the readme, etc. Even if we check it, it might change under us (if it's a link), or on each release (if it's a bundled readme). Then we need to enforce this - take plugins out till they are fixed and notify the developer. We'd also have to add additional UI in the app to open the readme.

Basically that's extra work for us vs letting developers being responsible for their own plugins. Obviously I prefer to let the developers do their own thing as much as possible, and there are obvious incentive for them to do it right. Why link to some random page when they can link to their readme, and put donation links?

Few years down the line is not worth thinking about in my opinion - if in a few years it becomes absolutely necessary, we'll do it then, or maybe better ideas would have come up by then. What I'd prefer is some way to rate plugins - so a plugin that links to a page full of ads for example might get poor ratings, and that will be used to sort the plugins in search results or even hide them.

Thanks for your reply!

I'm sorry. I can't find it in the plugin repo.

image

It's a handy plugin.

I think you misunderstood. This plugin is not in the plugin repo, thus cannot be found when searching for it:

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Ah, totally didn't realize that I had installed it manually.

Very sorry. Then I guess my whole post was pointless since you can't control things at all that aren't in the repo. Very sorry.

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