If you are like me occasionally you have to find a plugin and you go and check the npmjs.com site and do a search for NativeScript and then peruse a ton of entries; some relevant and some not so much.
Well, last night as I was finally working on updating my manually done plugin list (http://github.com/nathanaela/nativescript-plugins) ; I realized that the number of plugins was just getting to be too great for me to now be manually tracking them all.
So I set out to create something that could automate everything; I found a site/project called react.parts that was open source. I quickly downloaded the source and glanced through it and promptly borrowed the data updater component. I made a huge number of changes to the updater, some was just fixing some bugs and some was that I needed totally different fields for my purpose. I am happy to announce today it runs on one of my servers every night getting and building the dataset for the all new NativeScript plugin site:
http://plugins.nativescript.rocks
The site as of today, Feb 18, 2016, the site lists 86 different plugins, my old manual list only had 45. As the authors fill in data in the plugins, the data will automatically be updated and added.
We have a total of 33 different authors making NativeScript plugins! Not bad for less than a year, and Eddy Verbruggen has the most plugins; at a count of 12 of them! Wow, way to go Eddy!
For you plugin authors you need to make sure you have in your main package.json, the following items to get listed properly. Some of these items if missing will be considered a minor issue; others will cause your plugin to NOT show up. At this time you MUST have a link to the github repo that hosts it, you also must have either "nativescript" or "{N}" in your keywords.
If you want the Windows, iOS or Android icon to show up on your plugin, you need to use one of those key words also in your "keywords" OR you need to make sure you have them in your nativescript.platforms object.
Please make sure you include a version, and a license field; this is very helpful for people to quickly see in the list. And example of the fields is what I use for my nativescript-zxing plugin.
{
"name": "nativescript-zxing",
"version": "1.0.0",
"description": "A Simple ZXing barcode reader/writer wrapper",
"main": "zxing.js",
"nativescript": {
"platforms": {
"android": "1.4.0",
"ios": "1.4.0"
}
},
"repository": {
"type": "git",
"url": "https://github.com/nathanaela/nativescript-zxing.git"
},
"keywords": [
"NativeScript", "Barcode", "JavaScript", "Android", "iOS", "ZXing"
],
"author": {
"name": "Nathanael Anderson",
"email": "nathan@master-technology.com"
},
"bugs": {
"url": "https://github.com/nathanaela/nativescript-zxing/issues"
},
"license": {
"type": "APACHE",
"url": "https://github.com/nathanaela/nativescript-zxing/blob/master/LICENSE"
},
"homepage": "https://github.com/nathanaela/nativescript-zxing",
"readmeFilename": "README.md"
}Please note, it updates the data nightly, so if you submit changes; and you don't see it show up in 24 hours; ping me and I'll check into what is going on...