Wishlist / nice to have things for the Plug-In developer.

[rnio]

A collection of Ideas / Feedback for the Framework creators.

First of all I wanted to THANK you all for making it MUCH MUCH easier to develop a working plug-in ... allowing me to see my favorite German TV shows.

Here are a few things I was / am missing ... or maybe do not know about when developing my plug-ins.

- The framework should assume by DEFAULT that he plugin is using the MOST current version (with the exception during a brief transition period). Other framework versions should be selectable if needed.

- have the ability to kick off a new incarnation of the PMS (Plex Media Server) inside a terminal window for debugging purposes; or have the additional feedback (e.g. what mouse movement happened etc.) be directed to the plug-in logs. Once the PMS takes over a video item, I would NOT know whats going on (or wrong) if I had not started a new version of PMS before in its own terminal window.

- Be able to FORCE a flush of cached items (if possible just the ones pertaining to the plug-in I am working on): HTTP pages / THUMB-ART / BACKGROUND-ART; yes there is a workaround (e.g. rename some directories and later reverse them when everything is done) but it would be nice to have this from inside the framework.

- Some better HELP with site-config development .. I now learned that the color on my MAC is NOT necessarily the same as on my WINDOOF machine. Why can't I "ask" the PMS to just tell me what color it "sees" at a given coordinate? Maybe a specific LOG?

- An easier way to see the CONTENT of a media container (I have to cut and paste the "url" from the LOG into the browser ... and put "http://localhost:32400/video/" in front ... why not give the complete URL in the log? Or even something easier (links inside the container display) ... so I don't only see the container but also have a working link to the branch I see in Plex ... makes DEBUG so much easier.

Don't get me wrong ... all in all I am very happy, I just try to give feedback so that it will be even easier for the plug-in developers who just get started.

Thanks again and ... ALL please add your feedback to this too ... together Plex, as great as it already is, will be much much better soon :-)

[tyr]

Just some thoughts from me

• The framework should assume by DEFAULT that he plugin is using the MOST current version (with the exception during a brief transition period). Other framework versions should be selectable if needed.

I disagree, rather it should be compulsory for plugins to request the framework version they require. If I want a plugin to run under a new framework version then I can select this in the plist. I'm not necessarily going to have time to verify my plugins against a new framework each time one is released. Since the reason for marking a framework release as a new version would be API changes then just automatically moving from one to another will probably cause breakage.

• Be able to FORCE a flush of cached items (if possible just the ones pertaining to the plug-in I am working on): HTTP pages / THUMB-ART / BACKGROUND-ART; yes there is a workaround (e.g. rename some directories and later reverse them when everything is done) but it would be nice to have this from inside the framework.

Yeah this would be really useful.

• Some better HELP with site-config development … I now learned that the color on my MAC is NOT necessarily the same as on my WINDOOF machine. Why can’t I “ask” the PMS to just tell me what color it “sees” at a given coordinate? Maybe a specific LOG?

Yeah I find site configs a bit of a black art. Hopefully we'll see some more documentation for these at some point.

• An easier way to see the CONTENT of a media container (I have to cut and paste the “url” from the LOG into the browser … and put “http://localhost:32400/video/” in front … why not give the complete URL in the log? Or even something easier (links inside the container display) … so I don’t only see the container but also have a working link to the branch I see in Plex … makes DEBUG so much easier.

I do this when developing my plugins

DEBUG_XML_RESPONSE				   = True<br />
<br />
# In each place a response is returned<br />
<br />
  if DEBUG_XML_RESPONSE:<br />
	PMS.Log(dir.Content())<br />
  return dir

Then you can see the response returned in the plugin log.

I'd like to see some more time handling tools in the framework. Specifically it would useful if there was a hh:mm:ss -> 'duration' convertor. Most rss feeds have a itunes:duration field, this is in hh:mm:ss, or mm:ss, or just ss, I keep duplicating code to turn this into a format appropriate for the VideoItem, something to do this in the framework would be useful.