Append descriptions to plugin links in lists of plugins

[claremacrae]

Taken from my suggestion in this discussion in Discord:

Been thinking about ways to make categorising plugins easier, and I realised that the hub has various places where there are lists of names of plugins, and lots of plugin names don't tell you much about what the plugin does...

So I tried an experiment...

And a lot easier than having to navigate in to each plugin's page to see what it does.

Here's another option:

And why stop at just uncategorised plugins. These lists could all be more useful if the plugin description was included:

[claremacrae]

@eleanorkonik replied:

I'm in favor of the initial screenshot nut the indented bullets, because it's more information density. And we could put "custom information" in the bullets, like for example how the spaced repetition stuff I put together was "this is different from because" if needed.

what you're doing is really similar to the script argentum made for the roundup. I get [plugin name] by [github name] explanatory text pulled from the repo

I then said:

As it happens, the subsequent coding will be easier with the first version - as when plugin descriptions change, we can just say "replace the whole line" - rather than having to deal with pairs of lines.

For the avoidance of doubt, these lists are all machine-generated, and would be over-written. I think added curated text to them would be a step too far for this first information.
Because plugin names can change, and descriptions can change too. So it's easier to just regenerate them each time.

[claremacrae]

Thoughts in implementation

Here's some info on the implementation for adding descriptions to Uncategorised Plugins: It was a trivial change:

diff --git a/.github/scripts/templates/category.md.jinja b/.github/scripts/templates/category.md.jinja
index ffd80c83..0815d379 100755
--- a/.github/scripts/templates/category.md.jinja
+++ b/.github/scripts/templates/category.md.jinja
@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ publish: true
 ## Plugins in this category
 
 {% for item in plugins %}
-- [[{{ item.id }}|{{ item.name }}]]
+- [[{{ item.id }}|{{ item.name }}]]: {{ item.description }}
 {% endfor %}
 
 {% if related %}

Then just run update_releases.sh --plugins to regenerate the Uncategorised plugins file.

Making this add the current description to all other lists of plugins in the Hub vault will need a bit more work.

[claremacrae]

There might be some overlap with #282 - as both involve adjusting the content of existing lists in the Hub vault.

[lguenth]

Ah, this would be great! It would help make it easier to put plugins into categories (to get a better overview – for me, for example) and then we could write more comparisons (I would love to do that!) in other places.

Edit: I'm also in favour of option 1 for the uncategorised ones!

[claremacrae]

I'm working on this, and have a fairly reasonable first implementation.

I like the output.

For speed of testing during development, I've made it so that when update_releases.py adds new plugins, it also updates the descriptions of all existing plugins for now.

[claremacrae]

This one has reared its ugly head again:

[claremacrae]

@andynu As part of this, we should probably try to remember to update the Contributing section at the end of this page, to increase the chances that the description is copied in, and not just the plugin name.

https://publish.obsidian.md/hub/02+-+Community+Expansions/02.01+Plugins+by+Category/🗂%EF%B8%8F+02.01+Plugins+by+Category

[claremacrae]

And whilst there, we might point people to the 'Uncategorised Plugins' list, as a source of plugins needing categorisation....