Idea: User Plugin Submission Website

In my opinion, one of the factors which led to the downfall of Compiz was that there was absolutely zero formal documentation for creating plugins and a complete lack of a central area for people to post their custom plugins to the public. Had these two things existed, Compiz 0.9 might have been the predominant window manager today.

Considering that Wayfire is a similar compositor to Compiz, following a similar model of externally-compiled plugins already, as well as that Wayfire plugins can be installed without needing to recompile the entire compositor, it seems to me to be a no-brainer that there should be a central hub on the Web for people to submit and release the plugins they've made. What I am considering is a website like Pling's theme repositories or extensions.gnome.org, which would include a search function, an easy way to upload plugins, and full API documentation. Perhaps even this could be an extension of Wayfire's current website, with new sub-pages being called Docs and Plugins.

This would make it easier for people to find new functionality for their instance of Wayfire, and would attract more code- or customization-minded people to the platform. With luck, the community this site would create would end up producing community plugins which provide libraries for other community plugins!

As for API documentation, I'd figured since there was already a tutorial for writing plugins, there might as well be simple documentation for each part of the Wayfire API, based on the tutorials already written. It worked with Awesome, XMonad, and Qtile, so it could work with a similarly extensible window manager.

Start by reviewing Wayfire's existing plugin-writing tutorial and current website, then compare the proposed Docs and Plugins pages with the needs described here. The proposal is complete when a decided scope exists for plugin submission, search, releases, and API documentation, with an implementation plan for the central website.