Community or testing plugin gallery

nuest
Wed, 26 Mar 2025 22:11:33 +0000
Feature Requests

Describe the problem you would like to solve
As developers of new features for OJS, we rely on the OJS plugin mechanism to extend all aspects of OJS. It works great. However, if we develop a novel feature and want to test it with collaborating journals, we need the journal administrators to install the plugin manually. This is a hurdle for many because of the technical knowledge and access privileges required. Due to the fact that innovative ideas may be built based on funding from grants, even possibly broadly interesting plugins cannot easily be tested because they cannot be added to the plugin gallery due to the (completely justified) review that submissions receive.

Describe the solution you’d like
I can imagine two paths:

a. Open the plugin gallery to accept also alpha/beta/etc. plugins and transparently tag which plugins are checked by PKP staff.
b. Provide a second plugin gallery, to avoid any confusion, running in a separate GitHub repository, possibly even not managed by PKP but by volunteers, which welcomes plugins more freely, even in early development stages or with limited funding.

In both cases there should be a double confirmation before installation (“Warning, you are installing a not-reviewed plugin…”) and OJS admins should be required to actively enable the community plugin gallery for their journals.

Maybe the community plugin gallery should be a plugin itself?

Who is asking for this feature?
Developers, Journal Administrators

Additional information

Official plugin gallery: GitHub - pkp/plugin-gallery: The Plugin Gallery for the Public Knowledge Project

The documentation mentions a code review, but does not specific what is reviewed in particular

7 posts - 4 participants