The MooTools Plugin Forge
For those of you who didn’t notice, MooTools released it’s long vaunted user generated plugin system today – The MooTools Forge [accompanying blog post].
First, this is just awesome news, and a big tip-o-the-hat to Guillermo Rauch, who wrote the app. For those of you who have been around our community for the last three years, the forge was always something we were “working on”. There have been many versions created over the last few years, and many other community created initiatives, that didn’t quite do what we wanted. Guillermo jumped in and built a great system, closely integrated with git, that, well, it kicks ass.
The Clientcide Libs
I’ve uploaded four plugins to the forge as part of the launch (Tabswapper, MenuSlider, HoverGroup, and dbug). I chose these because they were just the simplest plugins that I could release; they just don’t depend on much and they do one thing. Releasing Stickywin, for example, represents a much greater challenge.
One of the things the forge requires is individual git repositories for each plugin. This means that I have to split up my one big repo into lots of little ones, rewriting my download builder, docs engine, and other tools to make these things easy to manage. Consequently, moving things into the forge is likely to be a long and laborious task. For the moment, the four plugins I’ve released are just duplicate files of what’s in the single Clientcide repo, but eventually, once I’ve split them all up, I’ll remove all the files from the Clientcide repo and then include them all as submodules. For the time being, they will be duplicates, and releasing them will happen as I have time (which is not very much these days).
Good Times
I’m really excited about MooTools here at the end of 2009. I hope to make a longer post here looking back at all we’ve done this year, but certainly the Forge release will be a big highlight. 2010 has a lot of interesting things coming, I’m sure, but perhaps the thing I’m excited most to see is all the good things that the MooTools community creates and uploads to the Forge.
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December 22nd, 2009 at 3:23 pm
this is great news. mootools really needed it badly. one thing i really liked about that site is code fomatting. can you tell me what library is used on the server to format sample codes?
thanks.
December 22nd, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Do you mean Lighter.js?
December 22nd, 2009 at 5:23 pm
wow! amazing! done with mootools!