^{(This is a part of the plugin survey 2010)}

DokuWiki plugins are primarily made available through their respective homepage in the plugin namespace of www.dokuwiki.org even if there are more out there in the wild. Hopefully the plugin homepage is published with the intent of making the plugin available to others (read more about friendliness). One of users' main objectives is to download and install the code. So which options are available at the moment?

A number of plugins have reached the status of “bundled” and are included in the official release. Besides their inherent compatibility, some additional testing, usefulness and ease of installation there are no extra requirements on bundled plugins. Some homepages of bundled plugins are even marked as experimental.

9 plugins (1%) are marked !bundled (i.e. included in the release).

• acl, config, importoldchangelog, importoldindex, info, plugin, popularity, revert, usermanager

Actually importoldchangelog and importoldindex has not been included since the 2009-02-14 release. But they show up as bundled because it's hardcoded in the repository plugin at www.dokuwiki.org.

A convenient way of installing is by giving a link to the plugin manager. 553 plugin pages (82%) have some sort of download link. Among those were broken at the time of survey. New repository function released in december? - download button is used by 213 plugins (32%).

There are many free download services. Sadly a lot of them could at best be described as annoying, for example 2shared, filefactory.com, mediafire.com, box.net and even sourceforge, requiring the user to view commercials and pressing a special download button. This will not work with the plugin manager. Some services even has automatic deletion of file not accessed within a certain time e.g. rapidshare.com. You should always check whether your selected host are compatible with the plugin manager. At time of writing files from www.free.fr are not compatible due to a bug in DokuWiki.

But there are good alternatives as well. There is a visible trend for a common repository. Previous year 22 plugins where avaliable at GitHub. Including GoogleCode plugins represented 10% of the plugins with download link. Now 126 plugins are located on GitHub and 28 plugins are located on GoogleCode. Together this accounts for 28% of the plugins with download link.

68 plugins (10%) have their “Details and download” page somewhere outside www.dokuwiki.org and 11 were broken at the time of survey.

• autosearch, credits, definitions, highlight, htmlokay, interpro, markdown, multilingual, select, shibbolethauth, term

htmlokay is on line but occasionally the server may be overwhelmed by probes.

By not using Bz2 compression you make it easier for your users. In many PHP releases BZ2 extensions are not included and they require a recompile of PHP, not feasible for a lot of users. Examples are conform, google_maps and lightboxv2.

More than one plugin package were done a wrong directory level. This will make the plugin manager fail with the message “Plugin package (0 plugins: ) successfully installed.”. Examples are dw2pdf, jira, multinamespace, phpinc, jmol2, geogebra2, codehighlight and pagetemplate

Another way of installing plugins are by cut-n-paste code snippets from the plugin homepage following the plugin installation instructions. There are 85 plugins (13%) that only offer manual installation. 142 plugins has at least one php <code> section besides a download link.

1 popular¹⁾ plugin are missing a download package.

• color

_{Continue to ⇒ compatibility}