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InfoQ Homepage News jQuery's Github-Driven Plugin Repository Launched

jQuery's Github-Driven Plugin Repository Launched

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The jQuery Foundation launched its new plugin repository on January 16th in an attempt to bolster and consolidate third-party development against the jQuery core library.

With the closing of the original jQuery plugin site over a year ago, the team set out to build a smarter plugin system that closes the loop on spam. Scott González, Secretary of the jQuery Foundation and biggest GitHub contributor to the revamped site, says the new site “aims to mitigate spam by having a submission process that most spammers aren’t targeting: revision control systems.” By leveraging GitHub hooks, third party jQuery plugin developers have a wealth of tools heretofore unavailable:

“One of the great things about having GitHub/Bitbucket as a requirement is that you instantly have a ton of features available as a user. You have a way to contact the author. You can see if the code is actively maintained. You can view and file bug reports, or even submit a fix. Most of these things weren’t available with the old site and we think that pushing developers to use a service which provides all of this free, in an environment that many are already using daily, is a huge step forward,” says González.

To publish your jQuery plugin, you need a post-receive hook and a package manifest file. Automation processes are already underway. “David Radcliffe has already submitted a pull request to add a service hook for the plugins site so that users won’t need to manually enter the web hook URL. We also plan to build a grunt task to generate a manifest file,” says González.

With the advent of jQuery 2.0 around the corner and the requirement that authors of legacy plugins explicitly republish their work atop the new platform, González and the rest of the jQuery Foundation hope to set the stage for active community involvement. “One of the great things about the new plugins site is that it’s 100% open source, so the community can suggest features, discuss the merit of features, and ultimately implement features. We’re really looking forward to serving our users better and iterating faster by bringing the same level of transparency and openness that our code projects have to our web projects.”

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