Cotonti Extensions META info

This project intend to develop some kind of Cotonti Extension developers style guide.

Preface

As further development plans includes creation of unified Extension repository for Cotonti we need, first of all, makes development standards. And improve current quality of code (mainly Extensions code) to meet this standard as a second step. Due to Cotonti wide development and grown improvements many Extensions become obsolete very fast and we need to track it compatibiliti with Cotonti itself and each other.

Aims of project

The main aim is to create unified rules for Cotonti developers to help making good and reliable code. The base orientation is Extension and Modules code. The basic rules and documentation for development is described in part 3 and part 4 of Cotonti documentation plan and must be used as basis. But we must go deeper - to unify all Extensions (plugins) for further use in repository. It intends some meta information for Extensions that may:

describe it
- breif description
- install notes
- how-to's
- screenshots
- Author name and links
- links to source code or download source
allow to add l10n of descriptions
specify dependencies
- for Cotonti extensions and modules
- for external libs and plugins, such as jQueryUI, underscore, require.js, etc
compatibility info for Cotonti versions
optionally changelogs

What benefits does it reveal?

First of all, it makes Extensions more accessible and easy-to-use for end user. There would be no need to download to try, then asking on forum for how-to, then throw out due versions incompatibility. User must be allowed to easy search, getting full extension info and «one click» installs it.

The second reason for meta information is to simplify manage of extensions within expected repository.

What we need to do?

specify types range and classes for storing information
define methods to store this information within Extension bundle
define types for storing bundles (achives/git repositories/something else)
define formats for storing certain kind of information (for descriptions, for DEPS, for l10n, etc)

Current progress

Here you can find links to different parts of proposed standard:

README.example.md — example of Extension main desctiption file.
versions.example.md — example of Extension change log file

Docs translation

Any translated versions of this documentation you can find in lang folder within this repository. As example:

README.md — in russian