JQuery Shutters Plugin Site

Let me give you a little background on this, I'm on the jQuery Board and a member of the core team.<p>A new jQuery plugins site isn't too far away. We should have a blog post up in the next few days with the details, I won't steal the thunder but the new site will discourage spam, promote plugins with higher quality, and provide a consistent way for users to report/discuss bugs.<p>&#62; Wouldn't it be better to open the new plugin site then close the old one?<p>Yeah that was our goal. In cleaning up spam on the old site we got a bit overeager and decided it wouldn't make sense to leave the broken remains.<p>&#62; It would be great for the end user and plugin authors if they (jquery.com) curates the plugins themselves.<p>Most of us are volunteering our time to the jQuery project. If you are agreeable to the same pay scale, you can be one of us and help curate the new plugins site. Get your company to give you 20%-time.

If I was to create a jQuery plugin site, I would make it a "shopping cart" system where you can pick and choose all the (curated) plugins you want and the site will package it all in a nice zip, provide you with a snippet of code to run it properly, and optionally give you a (paid) hosting of the customized code on a CDN. It could eventually have paid plugins available for further monetization.

I've been disappointed by the quality of many of the plugins listed on the site for a while. I often have to rely on plugins I have used before, read of on HN in the past, or ask other developers--rather than going to the plugins page. Granted the plugins I end up using are also in the list I would have seen, there is nothing separating them from the really bad ones.<p>I wonder if the number of bad plugins comes from the relatively small disparity between being able to use jQuery and writing a plugin. jQuery's whole premise is being an easy to use programming language. In other models (wordpress for example) the bottom 50% (or more, I don't know, I'm just making up numbers) of "administrators" would have no idea how to make a plugin. Verses the bottom 15% (again completely fake numbers, just for demonstration) of jQuery users may be unable to do so.

Finally. It would be great for the end user and plugin authors if they (jquery.com) curates the plugins themselves. I'm sure a lot more exploration will happen on their site vs scouring the web. I know I've never relied on their old plugin site to find anything.

Wouldn't it be better to open the new plugin site then close the old one?

I would rather they defer the handling of plugins to Github. The social features of Github makes it easy to evaluate what plugins are popular among respected developers. Github also encourages contribution to an existing plugin as opposed to creating two dozen plugins that all do the same thing.

My preferred solution is Ender (<a href="http://ender.no.de/" rel="nofollow">http://ender.no.de/</a>) and searching sites like GitHub.

If I remember right, the jQuery plugins site was one of the only other open-source repositories powered by the Drupal Project module (drupal.org/project/project) besides drupal.org itself. I think that jQuery might even have been running the Drupal 5 version. The Project module, which they'd have to either fix or dig out of, is a massive chunk of code. Upgrading to Drupal 6 would be painful, and finding people who have the knowledge and desire to hack on the Drupal 5 version would probably be really tough.

Please forgive me, but I'll use this post to ask a question I've been wondering for a while. Is it better to use a minified js/css of <i>all pages of the website</i> or to make each pages as minimal as possible? For instance, if I use 4 jquery plugins on a splash page, 2 jquery plugins in the "signup" part and 5 other jquery plugins a little bit everywhere.. should I bundle all these plugins into one big .js, minified it and put it on the splash page so that it is cached?

I believe this is a good thing. I jQuery daily, and when searching for a plugin lately I would avoid the plugins site when it came up in search results. It was outdated and the stuff in there isn't generally well maintained. I was glad to hear about a new plugin site coming (it was announced at jqcon in Oct I believe) and see this as a positive move towards that being live.

What's the advantage of shuttering a site over just leaving the existing site running and developing a new one behind the scenes?

Maybe a third-party curated site like rubygems.org would be better.

This certainly is interesting timing. I've been dissatisfied with plugins.jquery.com for quite a while. Earlier this year, I began development of an entirely new site for hosting javascript packages (including but not limited to jquery plugins (after all, jquery plugins are nothing but normal javascript code with a dependency on jquery)).<p>As of last week, that site is finally up and ready for beta. I was planning on announcing it this week or next.<p>If anyone here on HN has a jquery plugin or any other opensource javascript library or framework, and would like to give some feedback, please let me know via twitter or email (see my HN profile for both). The more people that can test it out privately, the better I'll feel launching it :-)<p>EDIT: Also, I plan on completely open-sourcing the site itself, like Github has done, once the site is launched.

Misleading headline, it is only temporarily closed.<p>I assume it was effecting their Google rank, otherwise they would have left the old one open.

+!

Although WordPress' repo uses SVN (I prefer Git), it runs really smoothly. Something like that would be great for jQuery, but you wouldn't need the whole update feature set.