[GUI Plugin] Plugin Updater **Deprecated**

[jackie_w]

@kiwidude,
As a developer I'm a total beginner, but for my one plugin there is already a ChangeLog and I'm quite happy to keep it up-to-date or reformat it as required should there ever be a new version.

[kpw]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Whether this feature could happen is down to whether the other plugin developers are willing/interested in maintaining a change history file for their plugins. Unless someone has a different suggestion, it would perhaps involve adding an attachment of a particular name to their first post (e.g. changelog.txt).

So in particular... meme, user_none, kpw, jackie_w & javanmaar - as current plugin developers what are your thoughts if any?

I maintain a spoiler in the first post for my plugin with the change history at the moment. I can easily update it with a new format, whether that be a separate attachment or inline in the post. If the separate attachment is the approach of choice, I would probably continue to keep the inline spoiler section as well for folks who are browsing the forum.

[kovidgoyal]

Something like that. Or a section in code tags with the first line being Changelog, or whatever you find easy to parse.

[kiwidude]

Thks all for the responses. My only reluctance in using SPOILER tags was the difficulty in parsing that out, particularly if your post uses them for other reasons like meme does extensively. It will require some specific text to be present which means a little more care for the developer to get that right.

However I 100% agree with you kpw that it is more convenient for a user browsing the forums, and it would be annoying to have to maintain your history in multiple places. I will experiment and see what I can come up with.

[meme]

I maintain my version history in 2 places. One is a history.txt file in the plugin zip. The other is as a spoiler in the text for easy viewing.

If you want to use text in the posting to display to the user, then I have no issue formatting it in a way that you can use (although I like the spoiler to hide things people might not want to see. But then my plugin has a lot of information to present and spoilers were the only way to avoid overwhelming people).

If you want to display the contents of a file, then I can rename the file from history.txt to something else if you prefer (keeping .txt so it displays properly when opened). You could then download and extract the zip to get the file and display it in a window for the plugin or just provide a button/link to open/view it.

Or I could just attach the file to the plugin thread's first post - which might be easier because then I can just link to that file instead of an inline spoiler (I'll give that a test) and you could link/access it easier.

Would you want to display just the recent changes or the whole change history? If you just want to display recent changes I'd think you would be restricted to showing just the update for the newest version and not the updates since the last version a user has installed. But showing just the recent stuff might take more parsing and restrict the format a lot more.

[theducks]

After installing plugin updates, the Install button is left 'enabled'

If I start the updater with no updates available, the 'Install' button is (IMHO properly) disabled.

[kiwidude]

Thx for that, I will make sure it is fixed in this weekend's release.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Thx for that, I will make sure it is fixed in this weekend's release.

Thank YOU for the plug-in

[kiwidude]

I've just done a quick experiment with using an inline spoiler text for version history in the first post of the Book Sync plugin. It also coincides that kpw's plugin post already "conforms" to the requirements. Quite simply they are that you have a line containing "Version History" (case insensitive) on the line preceding the Spoiler with your text. Inside the spoiler put whatever text you like.

See the attached screenshots for the changes I made to the GUI - the contents of your spoiler tag are rendered in the same html in the popup window. The Version History button is enabled based on the presence of a value of "History: Yes" (case-insensitive) in the plugins sticky index.

Any thoughts? This may all be an interim solution until we move the plugins to a repository but it is simple enough for the meantime. I think the spoiler is more convenient for forum users than additional popup windows from attachments and it will be faster to display from the plugin as one less retrieval.

[kovidgoyal]

Looks fine to me.

[meme]

Looks good - basically the same format I was using. Trying it out with the attached .txt was annoying waiting for it to appear - glad you can parse the inline text.

Any issue with using an indent around the spoiler - just to make it look nicer/consistent with the rest of my text? (I've update my plugin's first post to this format)

[kiwidude]

Thx Kovid/meme.

@meme - there "was" an issue but not any more. So you can use the INDENT tag, or not.

[kiwidude]

Changes as follows:

• Rewrite for new plugin infrastructure in Calibre 0.7.53
• Add a Version History button for reading from SPOILER tags
• Fix install button not disabled after last available update installed
• Rename Uninstall to Remove plugin for consistency with Calibre dialog
• Add buttons to toggle enabled status and show configuration dialog
• If plugin launched with ctrl or shift key pressed, show all plugins

[Loeffel]

That looks really good, even the feature that the window size of the history is saved. Really good work.

[kiwidude]

Thanks Loeffel, much appreciated.