Plugin Survey 2009

This is a survey of all plugins present in the plugin namespace of www.dokuwiki.org. Data was collected by an automated script 2009-08-13 with some additional manual data refining and mining. A total of 562 pages was examined containing 539 plugins. Source code for 456 plugins (85%) was downloaded and analyzed.

Why?

• To answer questions like ”Who uses this Event?”
• Background to a discussion about plugin manager, meta data links, navigation, tags
• Collect a ToDo list for WikiGnomes.
• Just for the fun of it, if you like statistics, you know what I mean

The survey…

• Deployment - Where and how do users find and install the plugins?
• Compatibility - Are we up to date? Are syntax conflicting with other plugins?
• Source code - Code metrics and which plugins have RTL CSS defined?
• Events - List of found users for each event.
• Friendliness - How well are the plugin system adopted to non-programmers?
• Developers - How many has contributed to DokuWiki's wealth of plugins?

Enjoy! — Håkan Sandell 29-Aug-2009

What about the 23 other pages? IMHO some pages in the plugin namespace could not be considered plugins. All mentioned below beside div_span_shorthand were excluded from the plugin survey.

Manual like page

• repository - This is the plugin for displaying the plugin list on www.dokuwiki.org. Page only contains a reference of how the database entry should be for each plugin home page. No code is published but it is reported similar to data plugin.

Homemade redirect

• rename - Points to pagemove

Deleted

A plugin without database header is not visible in the main plugin list.

• definition_list - Intentionally removed, superseded by definitions.
• template_selector - Intentionally removed, superseded by config.
• math_old - Intentionally removed, superseded by math.
• category - Intentionally removed, superseded by tag.
• calendar - Intentionally removed, experimental, not working.
• smaller - Intentionally removed, superseded by BBcode.
• larger - Intentionally removed, superseded by BBcode.
• addnewpage_old - No database header for uncertain reasons.
• diskussion_forum - Work in progress, since 2006
• coloured - No database header for uncertain reasons. Very similar to the syntax plugin tutorial.
• inline_folding - No database header for uncertain reasons.
• inline_folding2 - No database header for uncertain reasons.
• folding_sections - No database header for uncertain reasons.

Plugin twin

• div_span_shorthand - This page provides two related plugins: Span Shorthand and Div Shorthand. They were counted as one but code for both were examined during survey.

Meta plugins

There is also a meta plugin system based on the plugin command. Some additional commands (class extensions) are published as plugins even though they could not be installed using the plugin manager. See this forum post for an example of how another command is born.

• freemind
• template
• date_time

Other stuff

• djangoauth - Extension of auth_basic, should reside in auth namespace.
• joomla - Bridge between Joomla and DokuWiki, not designed as a regular plugin.
• newpagebutton - Should probably be considered spam although I have no access to the page history.
• hideindex - This is a mod and should reside in the tips namespace.
• wysiwyg_nicedit - This is a mod and should reside in the tips namespace.

Not all plugins are published at www.dokuwiki.org and these were not included in the survey. Here are some examples:

• OAuth - Implements basic oAuth support.
• search-logger - This plugin uses the search events to detect a search and store it in a database.