Central plugins repository

[curtis]

There are several large collections of plugins online:

• The  main ImageJ site's list, including links to many external sites
• The  ImageJ Documentation Wiki's list
• The  ImageJ Plugins project
•  Fiji comes with many plugins, and the ability to automatically update them to the latest versions available from the Fiji repository

We would like to create a central list of plugins here at ImageJDev.org. Since the site uses  Drupal, it can allow user contributions similar to the ImageJ Documentation Wiki, but the process can be more structured. Drupal allows custom content types, and the ability to create views of the data as tables and lists. It also allows file attachments. This approach would eliminate the need to manually update index pages and other such bookkeeping.

Ultimately we would also like to have an update checker that does plugin updates based on the latest versions available here.

[curtis]

We have created a preliminary "ImageJ plugin" content type on the site, and created one page to demonstrate the idea:

 http://imagejdev.org/diffusion-limited-aggregate-models

We still need to create tabular views to show an indexed list of plugins.

To migrate plugins from the main site en masse, it would be straightforward to harvest and parse all the HTML, generate a spreadsheet of information, proof-read it for errors, and then generate SQL insert statements to populate the information.