Evolution Plugins (Was Re: Rise of the Plugins)

["Sankar P" <psankar novell com>]

Hi All,

Some of the issues that were discussed (here and in #496839) and my
personal take on them will be:

1) Plugin list being un-manageable 

I am thinking of adding a smart-search-box which will query based on
plugin-names and pre-defined-tags associated with each plugin. This will
make it easy to find out the plugin that you are looking for.

Do you have any suggestion for how you want the Evolution Plugin-manager
to look like ?  Can you send any mockups that you have in mind ?

2) Some plugins should not be shown 

This may not be possible as people may not want a functionality
implemented by a plugin. Disabling this plugin helps them to save
screen-real-estate (menu-items etc) and reduces memory foot-print. 

If any of the core feature is implemented as a plugin, I accept that it
should not be shown in the plugin-manager and will happily remove it
from the plugin-manager list. (It should have been core-code than a
plugin in the first place though) 

HTTP Calendars and IMAP Featuers are not core features since it may not
be needed by everyone. Say a corporate Evolution-GroupWise user.

3) Splitting Evolution into individual applications

I have seen this asked by people a few times. But I wonder what good a
mail-client or Calendar-client will be without an addressbook. 

Evolution shell will not load a component (Tasks or Notes) unless you
click open the component (except for addressbook) explicitly. But some
people have a mis-conception that all components are always loaded (and
hence consumes memory etc.)

IMHO a better approach will be to make the user choose what components
he want to see in his Switcher. Say if someone wants to use only Mailer
and Address-book, do not bother showing the Calendar component in the
switcher.

Atleast for me, It will be far more useful than launching two or three
applications everyday morning (Mail/Calendar/Tasks)

4) Evolution Preferences Dialog is Horrendous

Yes. This is a terrible thing to have especially when you are working in
low resolution. The reason why this was so mammoth was because even the
plugin configurations were added to the General preferences. 

>From 2.12 onwards, we have Configure support for plugins and hence
people can configure plugins within the plugin-manager window itself.  

attachment-reminder plugin's configure UI has been already moved from
General preferences to Plugin-Manager-Configure already. Work is on for
Automatic-Contacts and other plugins already.

One another option will be to show the preferences of the current
component alone. Like if you launch preferences from Mailer component
then only Mailer preferences should be shown.

-- 
Sankar
Gnome-Evolution Plugins Maintainer

 Novell, Inc. 
Software for the Open Enterprise™
http://www.novell.com