Plugin Survey 2011

Welcome to the third survey of all plugins present in the plugin namespace of www.dokuwiki.org. Data was collected by an automated script 2011-11-23 with some additional manual data download and mining. A total of 846 wiki pages containing 825 plugins was examined and source code for 802 plugins (97%) downloaded and parsed.

153 new plugins has been released since previous survey in September 2010 giving a growth figure of 23% a year.

Why?

• To answer questions like ”Who uses this Event?”
• Monitor plugin developers response to changes like the new download button and new events
• Give background to discussions about the plugin manager, meta data links, navigation & tags
• Collect a ToDo list for WikiGnomes and some certain developers
• Just for the fun of it, if you like statistics, you know what I mean

Find the answers in 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 have contributed to DokuWiki's wealth of plugins?

Some new highlights in the 2011 survey

• Readability analysis of plugin homepages
• Number of plugins using jQuery
• Usage of PHP5
• Deprecated events usage
• List of plugins saving data on action SAVE
• Usage of the new securitywarning field in repository database
• Graphs!

Enjoy! — HåkanSHåkanS

Stockholm, Sweden 18-Dec-2011

What about the 21 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. Compared to last year, some pages have moved to more appropriate namnespaces and wysiwyg_nicedit plugin is now considered a real plugin.

Manual 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. There is also a separate repo API description with a link to the source code.

Homemade redirect

• header - Points to numberedheadings, database header used to collect/show popularity points?
• html_comment (new) - Points to htmlcomment
• rename - Points to pagemove
• sioc - Points to dokusioc

Deleted

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

• addnewpage_old - No database header for uncertain reasons.
• category - Intentionally removed, superseded by tag.
• coloured - No database header for uncertain reasons. Very similar to the syntax plugin tutorial.
• definition_list - Intentionally removed, superseded by definitions.
• diskussion_forum - Work in progress, without code during 2006 – 2010, still missing database header
• folding_sections - No database header for uncertain reasons.
• larger - Intentionally removed, superseded by bbcode.
• math_old - Intentionally removed, superseded by math.
• pdfbook - Intentionally removed, superseded by bookcreator.
• smaller - Intentionally removed, superseded by bbcode.
• template_selector - Intentionally removed, superseded by config.

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 command plugin. 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.

• date_time
• freemind
• gist
• template

Mods

While modifications found last year has moved to better places, now there is a new one .

• getraw - (new) Creates a url to get raw contents of a wiki, with authorization.

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.
• Files plugin - (new) Features: attach files/dirs to Wiki and coment them all, HTTP/WebDav/FTP access to the files storage, define ACL's for files storage, create filestorage pages using templates
• Exam Plugin - (new) Give users an easy access to upload/download examns and solutions.
• Extension Plugin (new) - The new extension manager for DokuWiki, part of GSoC 2011.