[amet]

To start a list of the XBMC addons by categorizing them by "type" is starting out backwards. The categories should be the same as the XBMC addon browser.

I'd have to agree with that

[stoli]

But there are still distinct addon types:

Video
Music
Program
Script
Skin
- is Eventclient still distinct?

[Jay_M]

To the end user it won't matter if it is technically a script or program, just that it achieves their desired result. I think it would be better to put it in a format that is categorically what will be within XBMC than what is technically more accurate. The most important thing is to make it easy for the user.

[KiSUAN]

I don't care if they are plugins, scripts or whatever, but breaking by repo makes no sense, its not a repo list, it's an addon list, if you want to categorize you do by type of addon, then you move to function and so on.

Now if the type of addon has no consequence it's another matter, I'm all on board to break down based on function only.

Take the brake down of XBMC browser, the ones I can remember are:

Album Information
Artist Information
Movie Information
Music Video Information
Tv Information
Music Addons
Picture Addons
Program Addons
Video Addons
Weather
Web Interface
Skin
Subtitles
Lyrics

Anyone missing?


Edit:

Still the problem with the wiki persist, you have to put the values on top of the brake down (title), can't pin point the problem.

[Jay_M]

I like the new page. I could still make an argument for separating the official and unofficial repo's, but if no one else agrees then I will defer to kisuan.

Might as well add a section for PVR Client addons.

[KiSUAN]

Wich one do you refer, because I was testing a lot.

I first brake it down to:

1 Infromation

a Album
b Video
...

2 Addons

a Picture
b Programs
...

3 Skins

4 Lirys

....


I was just testing, the result was good in my opinion, but I'm not trying to impose myself or nothing by doing the things first so it might stay that way, it just helps me think in different structures and lay outs.

Now it's just the common listing, with no division just as if it was the XBMC browser, reverting it's simple if you like more the other, I do, find it more "clear", but that's me of course.

[KiSUAN]

Some input in how is building/forming? List of XBMC Addons

[Jay_M]

Looks good so far, I even see stoli already made an addition. Please kisuan continue taking the initiative in getting this started.

One point that I would really like to stress is that it would be better for the wiki page to match the addons browser within XBMC. This will work better for several reasons.

1. Users will be able to relate the two sources together better. If they see the same categories in both places then it will easier to recognize what is where.
   
2. Addon devs will be able to categorize their additions more consistently. The addon browser is organized by the XML tags that define the addon categories. If we only use these categories in the wiki, then the addons will have to go into the sections in both places. Ex. You have a "Weather" section in the wiki but there is not one in the addon browser.
   
3. Maintainability, If we only use the XML categories that the devs have defined as acceptable, in the future when new categories are added to the browser they can also be added to the wiki
   

I think consistency is the goal here. XBMC already has a system for browsing the addons, all we need to do is copy that same thing to the wiki. I'd like to see the same category names and even the same order.

[KiSUAN]

I have nothing against with you criticizing or having a different opinion, im all for it, they made me search and learn more things as I had and I'm looking into XBMC code, but they don't seem to be based in an understanding on how things works or how they are structured. You refer to what the devs do but don't seem to understand what is it. Therefore your reasons are wrong.

There is a Weather tag in the addon browser, I'll leave it to you to learn how to "see it", acces to it.

If you just take a moment and analyze the wiki and browser for just a second, you might be able to see that I didn't change any category and they fully match the ones in the browser. You will see that every subcategory of Information on the wiki corresponds with the browser, the only difference that instead of putting the "information" (which is the "category" of the addons as I understand) at the back of the naming and leave them all separated I group them under it, giving them more coherency and making it easy to identify the purpose/function (category) of the addon. So users will be able to search and understand more easily what they are looking for.

Addon browser I suppose is organized by what you refer as XML tags, do you happen to know wich are does XML tags? Because I suspect you don't, as you don't know the addon categories in reality, I'm not claiming to know them, been searching the XBMC code, but can't find were is any information contained in the addon.xml linked to the browser tags.

Also, please stop referring to de devs and think for yourself, they do what they can as best as they can, this doesn't mean it's the best it can be done. I for one think the categories in browser are pretty crappy, they don't contain any solid description into what they are, I guess Information or Addon is a clue, next to movie, music and so on, but to me they are the bare minimum, and grouping the categories like I did is way easier to understand/find the addons.

New categories can be always added to the wiki, the wiki can always be changed, that has nothing to do with maintainability, solid structure and categories have to do with maintainability and that's what I'm trying to do.


Edit:

If someone could point me where I could find how XBMC assigns each addon to the categories, because I've been looking into all this https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/tree/master/xbmc/addons with no luck.

I guess that the "Tags" that identify each addon type are the one in point

Code:

<extension
    point="........"

and this are all the "Tags" or "real" type of addons

Code:

static const TypeMapping types[] =
  {{"unknown", ADDON_UNKNOWN, 0, "" },
   {"xbmc.metadata.scraper.albums", ADDON_SCRAPER_ALBUMS, 24016, "DefaultAddonAlbumInfo.png" },
   {"xbmc.metadata.scraper.artists", ADDON_SCRAPER_ARTISTS, 24017, "DefaultAddonArtistInfo.png" },
   {"xbmc.metadata.scraper.movies", ADDON_SCRAPER_MOVIES, 24007, "DefaultAddonMovieInfo.png" },
   {"xbmc.metadata.scraper.musicvideos", ADDON_SCRAPER_MUSICVIDEOS, 24015, "DefaultAddonMusicVideoInfo.png" },
   {"xbmc.metadata.scraper.tvshows", ADDON_SCRAPER_TVSHOWS, 24014, "DefaultAddonTvInfo.png" },
   {"xbmc.metadata.scraper.library", ADDON_SCRAPER_LIBRARY, 0, "" },
   {"xbmc.ui.screensaver", ADDON_SCREENSAVER, 24008, "DefaultAddonScreensaver.png" },
   {"xbmc.player.musicviz", ADDON_VIZ, 24010, "DefaultAddonVisualization.png" },
   {"visualization-library", ADDON_VIZ_LIBRARY, 0, "" },
   {"xbmc.python.pluginsource", ADDON_PLUGIN, 24005, "" },
   {"xbmc.python.script", ADDON_SCRIPT, 24009, "" },
   {"xbmc.python.weather", ADDON_SCRIPT_WEATHER, 24027, "DefaultAddonWeather.png" },
   {"xbmc.python.subtitles", ADDON_SCRIPT_SUBTITLES, 24012, "DefaultAddonSubtitles.png" },
   {"xbmc.python.lyrics", ADDON_SCRIPT_LYRICS, 24013, "DefaultAddonLyrics.png" },
   {"xbmc.python.library", ADDON_SCRIPT_LIBRARY, 24014, "" },
   {"xbmc.python.module", ADDON_SCRIPT_MODULE, 0, "" },
   {"xbmc.gui.skin", ADDON_SKIN, 166, "DefaultAddonSkin.png" },
   {"xbmc.gui.webinterface", ADDON_WEB_INTERFACE, 199, "DefaultAddonWebSkin.png" },
   {"xbmc.addon.repository", ADDON_REPOSITORY, 24011, "DefaultAddonRepository.png" },
   {"pvrclient", ADDON_PVRDLL, 0, "" },
   {"xbmc.addon.video", ADDON_VIDEO, 1037, "DefaultAddonVideo.png" },
   {"xbmc.addon.audio", ADDON_AUDIO, 1038, "DefaultAddonMusic.png" },
   {"xbmc.addon.image", ADDON_IMAGE, 1039, "DefaultAddonPicture.png" },
   {"xbmc.addon.executable", ADDON_EXECUTABLE, 1043, "DefaultAddonProgram.png" },
   {"xbmc.service", ADDON_SERVICE, 24018, "DefaultAddonService.png" }};

[malte]

I really like the idea of this list. Thanks for starting to work on it!

I also like the addon browser in XBMC but as some of you already mentioned I don't get along with its categories, too. Some categories like Lyrics and Subtitles only contain 1-2 items, while others like Video contain dozens of addons and I can't see if a certain addon may be of interest for me (e.g. if I don't know the site that it handles).

So I would like to support procrastinators idea of building sub categories below large lists of addons (news, tv, maybe regional division, ...).

And some ideas for new properties to keep in mind for this list:
- tag (like suggested by procrastinator)
- rating
- languages
- region (if an addon makes only sense in a certain region)
- type (plugin/script/...)

But ofc all this depends on the result of this discussion if the wiki page and the internal browser should follow the same route or not. I would add +1 for a similar route with slight modifications.

[KiSUAN]

I really like the idea of this list. Thanks for starting to work on it!

I also like the addon browser in XBMC but as some of you already mentioned I don't get along with its categories, too. Some categories like Lyrics and Subtitles only contain 1-2 items, while others like Video contain dozens of addons and I can't see if a certain addon may be of interest for me (e.g. if I don't know the site that it handles).

So I would like to support procrastinators idea of building sub categories below large lists of addons (news, tv, maybe regional division, ...).

And some ideas for new properties to keep in mind for this list:
- tag (like suggested by procrastinator)
- rating
- languages
- region (if an addon makes only sense in a certain region)
- type (plugin/script/...)

But ofc all this depends on the result of this discussion if the wiki page and the internal browser should follow the same route or not. I would add +1 for a similar route with slight modifications.

Categories with fairly small group of addons could be very well grouped.

About the example you give, that supposedly should be addressed in the brief description, but it could be addressed at certain level in the category/grouping without breaking down to much or deviating from browser, though task but there's nothing to lose.

About the list there's only one that I find "hard" to implement, ratings, that I'm aware there's no rating system, so how would we implement this? Also, type column could be confusing for great part of the users and not relevant in most cases, and I assume most people interested in the "real" type would have little trouble finding out or already know.

Edit:

Already incorporated/changed some of your suggestions, columns for now

!Name
!Description
!Languages
!Region
!Owner
!Last modified
!Version number
!Forum
!Installable ZIP
!Icons

[procrastinator]

Thanks very much for setting this up. Looks good so far. The categories (i.e. addons, information, skins etc.) look good to me; personally, I wouldn't change them.

I agree that while a rating system would be nice to have, there's not really any way of implementing it at the moment. Doing so would require a system where people could register their rating. As this doesn't exist right now, and there's no easy way of setting it up, then I wouldn't worry about it.

On the wiki you have only put a section for the link to the installable zip. This is perfectly logical, but is it the case that XBMC will only check for addon updates if it has installed the addon zip's repository? I'm not sure if I've just made this up or whether it's correct though! I tried reading around but couldn't find anything. Anyway, if it is correct then it would certainly be useful to have the repo link in there too.

I do still think that the Tags could be useful. I brought it up primarily with video addons in mind because there are a lot of them already, and there are more being added every week. In the official repo the number of video addons is still manageable without tags, but if you put all video addons in one list then it'll start to become more difficult. Obviously descriptions help, but there will be a tipping point when there's so many that reading all the descriptions will just be annoying. Having tags would help you find what you're looking for more quickly.

For most addon categories other than video, and possibly audio, tags might not be strictly necessary because there are not enough of them to get confusing. So if you were to add a "tags" column to the table then you might only want to do this for audio and video addon categories (if that's possible).

I know that there will be a maximum number of columns you can add to the table, but I'll leave the choice of which ones to add up to you (KiSUAN) and any further discussion in this thread

[malte]

Sorry for the confusion about the rating field. I just thought about the rating that was planned to be implemented in XBMC some day (there already was a placeholder for it in the addon browser some time ago). But you are right, it makes no sense to add it now.

[KiSUAN]

On the wiki you have only put a section for the link to the installable zip. This is perfectly logical, but is it the case that XBMC will only check for addon updates if it has installed the addon zip's repository? I'm not sure if I've just made this up or whether it's correct though! I tried reading around but couldn't find anything. Anyway, if it is correct then it would certainly be useful to have the repo link in there too.

I think the answer for your question is (not so sure of the Q ):

The only way you have an update or popup of a given addon is if you have installed the repo of that addon.

So you won't get updates without the repo installed, so yes, it would be better to have repos addon link also. But there's so many things (columns) already and the links to installations of the addons are not necessary in reality and get outdated every time the addon is updated, demanding more maintenance of the table, and I bet many users might just install the addon and forget about the repo. So by forcing to install via XBMC the repo and then the addon we in fact will be "helping" the user, our self (less question later), making maintenance lighter, the table cleaner.

Also would like to point out that's there is already the Unofficial Add-on Repositories, so if we make the link available here for the repos we will be duplicating info from an already perfect (so far) wiki/addon.

I think the best choice is to make a column in which we point to XBMC or Unofficial Add-on Repositories, in case its the UAR we add the repository owner. So it might seem messy, but I think is the best for user and maintenance of page.

I do still think that the Tags could be useful. I brought it up primarily with video addons in mind because there are a lot of them already, and there are more being added every week. In the official repo the number of video addons is still manageable without tags, but if you put all video addons in one list then it'll start to become more difficult. Obviously descriptions help, but there will be a tipping point when there's so many that reading all the descriptions will just be annoying. Having tags would help you find what you're looking for more quickly.

For most addon categories other than video, and possibly audio, tags might not be strictly necessary because there are not enough of them to get confusing. So if you were to add a "tags" column to the table then you might only want to do this for audio and video addon categories (if that's possible).

I know that there will be a maximum number of columns you can add to the table, but I'll leave the choice of which ones to add up to you (KiSUAN) and any further discussion in this thread

Like I said, more columns will start to make the table more messy and loose consistency. It's possible to add as many columns to only one table as it's needed and if it's what people want it's ok, but I think that if it's needed given category could be braked down more and would be a better result, you can even navigate from the top index and you don't get tables of 30 continuous addons, even if you get a column tag, skin is going to be a tough one to digest and I gave no idea go to break it down.

Anyway, I'm just thinking, until it's done it's hard to say what's best in reality, I'm more see to believe.

If anyone could make a break down/ list of this given categories Movies and Music I would appreciate it, as I don't know them all that well.

[KiSUAN]

Already made changes to the tables and the page description reflecting the above.