Plugins need rating & comment system

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1

Hi, the plugins page really need a function to rate the respective plugin and leave comments for it. As a non-developer, I see no way to comment on the plugins and some of them are just really bad in certain regards - (for example the private plugin uses “password” as the password to enter the private sites, with no front-end/admin option to change that).

The plugins need feedback from non-devs (actual end users), to improve and fix problems. Yes I can make a post in the Plugins forum here, but that is just awkward and cluttered, it’s not an intuitive and cleanly organized way.
Besides that there’s still no way to rate a plugin.

This is something that makes the Wordpress plugin directory so great (and other CMS like October offer this function), because I can trust the reviews and ratings.
Grav in this regard is really lacking, and it makes Grav an a lot less great alternative as an CMS, because I have to make an uncomfortable extra effort to help improve plugins.

Good design does NOT ask the user to take unnecessary extra steps to do something, it makes it as easy a s possible for them.

I really hope you can add a comment & rating function to each plugin.

Cheers.

PS: The way plugins are displayed isn’t good either, the animation is annoying and I don’t like that I have to move to an external website to read the details about the plugin. Wordpress does that much better!

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Furthermore, the dev of the respective plugin should be notified when there’s a comment made.

3

I agree that the plugins-page (and really downloads-page in general) needs a rating-function, and much better organizing (with 100+ plugins navigation is very hard unless you remember the name of a specific one). However, the downloads in general need version-information specific to Grav, ie: “Compatible with Grav 1.0” and a rating specific to this.

For people who then use the plugin, the rating indicates that it works with their currently installed version of Grav. This is how the beastly WordPress does it (who have improved the plugins-listing a lot lately), and it is a good convention to follow to provide relevant information.

Version 1.0 and 1.1 of the specific plugin is mostly irrelevant to end-users, compatibility with a specific version of Grav is, however.

4

We’ll revamp the way Plugins and Themes are shown soon, when after Grav 1.1 is out.

You have some good inputs and more inputs are welcome as well!

Building and maintaining a rating and commenting system is a pretty time and effort intensive task, which would drive away from the actual development of Grav. There’s still a relatively limited amount of plugins that a quick overview can already help choosing one. Also, very few if any are doing the same thing, so I don’t feel the urgency for a similar tool.

If a plugin is in your opinion lacking, since every plugin is required to be hosted on GitHub there are issues and PRs to help improving it. That is where feedback for a plugin has to be sent, where the developer will actually get an email for every issue opened. The forum is a forum, for discussions.

Having all packages centralized is a huge plus over many other CMS marketplaces where all you see is usually a landing page and a download button. Here instead you always see how much progress is done on a plugin, the currently reported issues etc etc.

Again, I fee l it’s too early for such thing, but that’s just my opinion.

All published plugins are currently free and open source. This might change when there will be paid plugins where the source will not be published in the public.

Grav 1.1 is backwards compatible and if any plugin has issues they will be promptly resolved, if it’s a core Grav plugin, or we’ll help 3rd part developers make sure the plugin works if there’s any outstanding issue, so I don’t think there’s a need to say compatible with 1.0 or 1.1 at this point. Was different if it was a 2.0 release, which by definition breaks compatibility with 1.x.

WordPress can get away with crowdsourced versions information because of the amount of users, but we can probably do the way the Joomla extensions directory works, with the developer stating which version it works on. But again, I don’t think there’s need for this now, but other opinions welcome.

5

It’s actually really easy, just create a seperate page for each plugin with a bit of description and enable comments on each of these pages. That’s already part of Grav, isn’t it? (and I assume this website is build with Grav?)

Then get a basic jquery rating plugin. Sure getting it so that only logged in users can vote once may be more work, but at least enabling the comments is a matter of minutes for each plugin. And there aren’t that many yet anyway.

6

Thanks for your feedback! We’ll take this into account when we work on revamping the download pages.

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Looking forward to it !