DokuWiki has a very powerful, but easy to use plugin system. It makes extending DokuWiki's feature set easy. There are nearly 300 plugins available.

All those plugins where listed on a simple wiki page. Additionally to the list of available plugins, each plugin also had its own wiki page. This had several disadvantages:

1. Plugin authors had to update the list them self, making sure the correct order is maintained
2. The list had to be updated every time the plugin was updated
3. Plugin authors had to update the list and the plugin page
4. Plugins could not be categorized easily
5. There was no way to filter the list of plugins
6. The list¹⁾ was huge and editing large tables isn't the most pleasant thing to do
7. probably more

People suggested to build a database driven plugin repository similar to the ones used by content management systems like Joomla or Typo3.

Unfortunately there was no one volunteering to build such a system for DokuWiki. And my own time is fairly limited already.

In the same discussion Martin Tschofen and Terence J. Grant suggested to enhance the Wiki itself to make managing plugins more easy without having a full blown repository application. This weekend I just did this.

I created a new syntax plugin to be used on the plugin description pages. Plugin authors need to use this plugin to specify a few infos about their plugin and it will register it self with the new plugin repository. The repository is a plugin it self and gets all the infos from a database.

Plugins now can be looked up by type and tags. For each plugin is a standardized set of information available. It's easily maintainable from a single location for each plugin. It solves our current problems and might add a few new benefits as well.

The only problem is that all those plugin pages need to be updated to contain the new information. About one third has already been moved to the new system…

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