Easy Plugins Website - GSoC Project 2013

[Bhaskar Kandiyal]

Hello everyone!

I have been accepted to work with Pidgin as a part of Google Summer of
Code 2013 under the mentorship of Eion Robb. Thank you very much for
giving me the opportunity to work on this project.

My project is to develop a plugins website for Pidgin that will allow
plugin authors to upload their plugins for different platforms and the
users to install new plugins right from the website. Much like Mozilla
Addons website.

The project also includes developing a better plugins window for Pidgin
that can integrate well with the website so the user can install new
plugins right from Pidgin. This would enable easy and automatic
installation as well as updation of Pidgin plugins without performing
any manual steps like copy / pasting plugin files to relevant directories.

I have already developed basic demo website [1] (very basic) and plugins
window [2] for my proposal. And I'm looking for any feedback and or
suggestions on the following:

1. Design of the website and plugins window

2. Any extra features that plugin authors would want to have in the
website? (Versioning of plugins etc.)

3. How should we go about handling platform-specific plugins?

4. Security risk and issues of uploading binary plugins.

5. Anything else :)

I'll be developing the website in Django and my demo website runs on
Openshift. I'm thinking of keeping things there until there's a better
alternative.

Apologies for the long email :P

tl;dr Looking forward to an awesome summer :)

[1] - http://bhaskar-kandiyal.rhcloud.com/
[2] - https://github.com/gastly/pidgin-plugins-demo-app

Cheers,
Bhaskar Kandiyal