^{(This is a part of the plugin survey 2011)}

DokuWiki plugins are primarily made available through their respective homepage in the plugin namespace of www.dokuwiki.org even if there are more out there in the wild. Hopefully plugin homepages are published with the intent of making the plugin available to others (read more about friendliness). One of users' main objectives is to download and install the code. So which options are available at the moment?

A number of plugins have reached the status of “bundled” and are included in the official release. Besides their inherent compatibility, some additional testing, usefulness and ease of installation there are no extra requirements on bundled plugins. 7 plugins (1%) are marked !bundled (i.e. included in the release).

• acl, config, info, plugin, popularity, revert, usermanager

Actually there is an eighth bundled plugin, safefnrecode, but it was not marked as bundled in the repository.

A convenient way of installing is by pasting an URL into the plugin manager. 704 pages (85%) have some sort of download link. In some cases, saved downloads from last years surveys could be used for code analysis. In total 715 downloaded packages were analyzed. Among those were 59 broken at the time of survey.

• aclmadeeasy, acronym4glossary, amazon_heavy, autoincludeindex, backlinks, baselink, bibtex, blip, caltable, changemarks, chart, chord, classificationbanner, countdowndisplay, countdowntimer, dataloop, datapdo, delicious, diagram, dnsbl, dpicorrect, editformhelppage, ganalytics, google_maps, google_video, heise, html_comment, interpro, jmol, keywordvoting, kixovar, linkext, mathoperation, md5gen, mediamanager, nsrelation, nssize, oddeven, pdfdownload, pdfex, photoblox, ping, poll, progressbar, scrum, showfile, simpleweather, svgimg, tabtables, template_switcher, top10, traceroute, ueb, userhistory, webalbum, whois, wp_most_recent, xhtmlruby, youtubev2

Late 2009 the repository plugin introduced the possibility to add links to source code, bug tracker and a donate button. Since then developers and the plugin & templates team has spread their use.

There are many free download services. Sadly a lot of them could at best be described as annoying, for example 2shared, filefactory.com, mediafire.com, box.net and even sourceforge, requiring the user to view commercials and pressing a special download button. This will not work with the plugin manager. Some services even has automatic deletion of file not accessed within a certain time e.g. rapidshare.com. You should always check whether your selected host are compatible with the plugin manager.

But there are good alternatives as well. There is a clear trend for a common repository. Previous year 126 plugins where avaliable at GitHub. Now 232 plugins are located on GitHub. This accounts for 33% of the plugins with download link.

90 plugins (11%) have their “Details and download” page somewhere outside www.dokuwiki.org and 8 were unavailable at the time of survey. 16 of this years new plugins have their information externally (most of them CosmoCode's ICKE-wiki plugins). Here is a list of the broken links:

• autosearch (2:nd year), bibtex, chord, countdowntimer, highlight (2:nd year), interpro (2:nd year), markdown (2:nd year), piwik

By not using Bz2 compression you make it easier for your users. In many PHP releases BZ2 extensions are not included and they require a recompile of PHP, not feasible for a lot of users. Examples are conform, google_maps and lightboxv2.

Plugins are no longer required to implement a getInfo() function used by the plugin manager. Since DokuWiki 2009-12-25 release they may instead add an plugin.info.txt file which added better protection against download packages with faulty folder names. Now 36% of the plugin with download packages includes this file.

More than one plugin package are both missing a *.info.txt file and have a wrong folder structure. This will make the plugin manager fail with the message “Plugin package (0 plugins: ) successfully installed.”. Examples are jira, multinamespace and codehighlight.

Another way of installing plugins are by cut-n-paste code snippets from the plugin homepage following the plugin_installation_instructions. There are 89 plugins (11%) that only offer manual installation. 157 plugins has at least one php <code> section besides a download link. New plugins since last survey without download package:

• anchor, codepad, dokuwikitweet, hiddenheader, masciimath, mredirect, nodisp, previous, spatialhelper, timeline2

1 popular¹⁾ plugin are missing a download package.

• color

_{Continue to ⇒ compatibility}