[GSOC] Plugins Website Progress as of 29th July 2013

[Bhaskar Kandiyal]

Hi everyone :)

Just a quick mail to let you guys know of the progress as of now.
This week I implemented the basic functionality to download the
plugins from the Pidgin plugins window and install it into the user's
.purple directory.
Apart from that I modified the website's color scheme [1] a little bit
to make it look more professional and also I added a feature to detect
the client's platform and architecture from the HTTP User Agent so
that only the supported plugins will be shown to the user, unless
explicitly specified. This feature is still needs a lot of
improvements so I've not yet pushed it to the development website yet.
I also fixed some input validation bugs and did some minor tweaks to
the website.

Also, I have a little question, what would be the best way to
implement automatic updating of plugins in Pidgin? I've implemented a
REST API on the website which is passed a list of plugin ID's in JSON
and it will return the latest version number of all the plugin ID's
passed as a JSON string. The list can then be compared to the version
number's of the installed plugins to see which plugin needs to be
updated. This would be a quick and easy way to check for new versions.
But what would be the best way to execute the code that would check
for plugin updates? We can do it at Pidgin startup or we can have a
periodic check for updates (daily, weekly ?). Any suggestions on this
would be greatly appreciated :)

Cheers,
Bhaskar Kandiyal

[1] - http://bhaskar-kandiyal.rhcloud.com/