@PLegoux asked on reddit/r/gramps about why some addons are not available through the Addon Manager.
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 to be published…
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 deveopers: just put it on their GitHub for people to discover… or more likely, to never discovered. Users have to do all the work of manually downloading and installing.
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 arhive.