The fact that free plugins become commercial plugins is a pain in the ass.
And the second fact is the free ones will not developed any more...
And the plugin-manager follows a not "round" concept. For the normal user simply not usable.
That's what i noticed the last months.
Should i be sorry for this statement?
Rgds.
I tell you what I have noticed. I have noticed that you are extremely mouthed against what Rosali has done with Plugin Manager. You are entitled to your opinion but I seriously wonder if you have taken the time to look at what it has done. Moreover, I wonder how many times during the years he shared with the community all along you did something to help or support his work. It doesn’t feel good at all when you are in front of the barrel while others find it funny to play behind the trigger.
Nowadays users have to download plugins, upload them to the server and register them. It is the way it has worked for years.
How about Plugin Manager?
Download plugin_manager, upload it to the server, register plugin_manager and off you go to the download Center. Plugins supported by plugin_manager do not even need to be registered in .../config/main.inc.php.
Most users who wonder why is it that they have to manually upload plugins simply do not understand that Roundcube Webmail is distributed in 1000 different ways, different versions, different repositories and so on. For example, cPanel servers, Ubuntu - Debian servers and your own server will all have a different installation path and permissions. When it comes to automatic deployment security is to consider as a big concerning point. Do you want an outside service to install a plugin or a plugin update for your customized installation? Are you willing to give read /write permissions to the service in question to execute the update? We have tested these scenarios already and the most convenient advice that can be shared is not to attempt to do such a thing.
Plugin Manager presents a collection of plugins paid-downloads and free plugins as well in one single place. Users do not have to keep going back to 5 different sites to find out when plugins are updated, or if a new localization file has been released that might be needed or wanted. Translating plugins has never been easier and distributing plugins and plugins updates is way simpler with Plugin Manager.
What makes plugin_manager to look a little more complicated than other plugins is at the time to implement plugin_manager to allow users to enable or disable plugins as they please. There are two config files included with plugin_manager (config.inc.php.dist and config.inc.php.example). Users completely new to Roundcube Webmail will find it scary and complicated to configure it when they look at the php code in those files. The fact is that there is nothing else involved than to "copy and paste". Users more familiar with Roundcube will in fact get it up and running in a blink of an eye because they have a background understanding of Roundcube and its dynamics. If my 17 years old non-literate-computer-savvy sister can deploy and install plugin_manager as she does, chances are that many more people out there looking to host their own Roundcube Webmail can do it too. The only thing required to effectively install plugin_manager is "reading". Users don't like to read in its vast majority. We have verified and proved it over and over again by sending users to the documentation pages that we are making available. If you look at what we are doing with the documentation pages, they look more like a "how to guide" than anything else.
Back to your observations; you are looking at Rosali's hard work from a single individual point of view. That's really narrow at its best. With plugins releases one must deal with thousands of users, servers, configurations, PHP versions and the list goes on and on. Your mailbox will be saturated with all kind of questions from all kind of users, those who read and those who don't. You will be exhausted just before you get to the next <?php line. I can tell you from my own personal experience that Rosali is a great guy and works extremely hard for people that most likely he will never get to meet in his life.
I'm certainly convinced that criticism is a good thing but it doesn't help when such criticism is not accompanied with a positive suggestion that will help improve what we have there today.
The bad taste doesn't come for plugins which are coded with the intension to be useful to the masses but from people who don't recognize or support their developers. Don't try to teach a pig how to sing; it annoys the pig and it doesn't work.
