[development] jQuery plugins and update_status (was: jQuery 1.2 is released)

[Derek Wright]

On Sep 11, 2007, at 10:50 AM, adrian rossouw wrote:

> Do we know if their cvs tags are using something that project can use?

They don't use CVS at all.  The plugin source is usually hosted  
elsewhere, in fact.  They just use project.module for the project/ 
release browsing and issue tracking, not CVS integration.  In fact,  
some of the plugins aren't even hosted there, just pointers to their  
home pages elsewhere on the net.

> because you could probably extend/ use the code of update_status to  
> do that for you.

update_status doesn't know anything about CVS tags.  If jQuery  
plugins shipped with .info files, and they configured and ran the  
script that generates the .xml files with the release history, the  
existing update_status code in contrib (5.x-2.0) and the  
update.module in core (6.x) could already tell you if your jQuery  
plugins were out of date.  There's a special field in the .info files  
that the update(_status)? code looks for to find the URL to fetch the  
release history XML from -- if it's not there, it defaults to  
updates.drupal.org.

I'm in touch with the person who setup project* for http://jquery.com/ 
plugins, so if folks are serious about this, I could contact him  
again and propose to help get all this working nicely...

-Derek (dww)


p.s. I just tried this on a local test site -- the only weird thing  
is that update_status assumes modules, and you need a .module file  
for something to be listed on the modules page, even though the .info  
file is the only thing actually loaded.  So, you also need a bogus,  
empty .module file for each plugin, and to "enable" the plugin's  
"module" on the admin/build/modules page for update_status to know  
about it.  Other than that, it all works great. ;)

Not to toot our own horns, but I must say, Earl and I did a kick-ass  
job with this, such that it would all basically Just Work(tm) given a  
little extra server-side configuration on their end and *no* changes  
to the client code on our end.


p.p.s. They could even enable the project_usage.module on their  
server and start collecting plugin-specific usage stats. ;)  /me  
winks at drewish.