There are add-ons that have not been collected in the Gramps-Project repository or any of the other curated collections of addons. (Adding an experimental Addon is intimidating. Not only due to the vetting process but also the Sync’ing is worriesome. i.e., controlling what will be submitted is confusing.) They are scattered around GitHub and the Net.
It is difficult to remember which pieces that you collect from where. (They come from so many different paths.) So, like the “What patches are vital to you” thread, it seemed like another cross-reference thread would be useful.
This is just a starting list. (Sorry if I missed your contributions.) Add to it at your convenience:
a spectrum of reports are in the Uli22 Github repositories (This repository will take some dedicated exploring. Among others, it has reports that write data ready for visualization tools like Mayavi and visone.)
This was written as a sample/template for writing Reports using some of the more common objects. No interest was expressed in publishing, so it was never published officially.
Thanks. Corrected. I knew the DNA segment map was published. But associating your name with that tool gives the other plugin’s more credibility.
Actually, I think the items sent by eMail were different. They had separate registrations which made them a bit more digestible.
a sample/template for writing Reports using some of the more common objects. No interest was expressed in publishing, so it was never published officially.
Added and linked the Sample. Thanks.
My opinion is that we need to discover out how to distribute the sample that allows it to be used for tutorial purposes. Distributing through the Plug-in Management system would cause Registration Conflicts. It is too useful as built. So the prospective developer will want a copy that is intact. So they would have to discover how to make the clone register as unique … which creates a lot of opportunity to make it not load. And the registration failure messaging is almost concealed and very vague if you do find it. But I think the sample is valuable… enough that it was worth putting in time to make that thumbnail for the docs.
I have not come up with a good way to make a coding tutorial. The MediaWiki method for including sample code mangles the white space and is not friendly to copy’n’paste. Discourse is much better that way. But it is not well-suited to collaborative editing.
If the addon is read-only, we only check that it doesn’t contain any malicious code. Code quality is not important we prefer code that conforms to the Gramps coding standards.
For addons that write to the family tree, we ask that no hidden changes are made. The addon should only write data that the user would reasonably expect. A preview would be one way to ensure this, but it depends on the usage.
Do you know why some like this [Consanguinity] one have to be installed by hand and not with the plugin manager which doesn’t work for them?
I started to answer on Reddit… but decided it was more appropriate to respond here (where there are examples of such addons) and reference this posting.
Why do some addons need to be manually installed?
There is an extra stage of development for the installation automation or ‘publishing’ . That extra stage is not simple to learn. Many developers never feel their work has evolved to the point where it is worthy of the extra effort to publish.
There are 3 ways to ‘publish’ an addon.
Developers can submit their addon to the official ‘gramps-project/addons-source’ repository and let their maintainer deal with making it available.
Or they can self‐publish by creating a “project” compatible with the Addon Manager: in a standard file structure and with a standard index to the collection of addons. (Which is a lot of work to start, maintain, and market.)
The third way is easiest for developers: just put it on their GitHub for people to discover… or more likely, to never be discovered. Users have to do all the work of manually downloading and installing. Announcing the addon on Discouse, Facebook, Geneanet or Reddit r/gramps is the simple way to address that problem.
I expect that there are a large number of plugins where the developer never share it publicly. Some don’t want the responsibility of of support, fearing being mocked or overwhelmed by the community’s unbridled enthusiasm. (@kmikkels and @ztlxltl were immediately engulfed by a tidal wave of enthusiastic feedback when sharing that they had a addon in development.)
For the addons that are shared without the “publishing” step, the Isotammi group created their ZIPinstall addon tool. It will install a Zip archive of a manually downloaded addon to the plugins folder within the Gramps User Directory. There is a caveat… it won’t work if there is more than one plugin in the zip archive.
There are some that are explicitly set to not be included in the Addon Manager listings.
That choice might be a legacy from before the Audience and Status registration options were expanded. But it might be a prerequisite that doesn’t need an explicit install, its install just piggybacks when the other is installed. Or the developer could have decided that it wasn’t ready for release.