User Experience / Interface Tiger Team
#MauticUXUI Driving Innovation: Shaping Engaging and Intuitive User Experiences
If we take an overview of what plugins are today within the platform, we will realize that they are integrations with external services such as CRM or data analysis tools, lead sources and other things that are directly related to some type of of a complete system that exists outside the Mautic domains and is independent of it.
Plugins from the marketplace have a characteristic more related to the addition of functionalities within the platform itself.
To ensure long-term consistency, considering that the marketplace itself is still a beta feature, this would be the perfect time to adjust some things with good planning so that this does not become a problem later.
The objective is to avoid confusion between the nomenclature of features added through the marketplace and the addition of external services such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.
As user help files grow we see that soon many different sections will be talking about plugins without a solid framework of differentiation.
This way, Plugins would be related to the Marketplace and External Services to what we find today on the Plugins page.
What do you think about all this?
The debate was closed on 24/04/2024 15:14 with these conclusions:
No changes
Report inappropriate content
Is this content inappropriate?
Close debate
What is the summary or conclusion of this debate?
Comment details
You are seeing a single comment
View all comments
Mautic still haven't healed from the last renaming. Segments used to be called Lists, contacts used to be called leads. So it's very confusing in the code where some code is using the old terms and the new code is using the new terms. The biggest problem is on the database level as changing names of tables and columns is very time consuming and such migration would be done when Mautic is offline as the tables will be locked for hours or days.
Another issue is with APIs and webhooks. If there are services connected to Mautic via APIs or webhooks and we change one keyword to another then all those services must be changed to use the new keyword. So every renaming is very costly and will cause confusing many years in the future, perhaps during the whole lifetime of the project.
The plugins in the Plugins page are installed plugins. Most of them are core plugins. The product team is trying to remove the core plugins from the core as the usage is minimal and the maintenance cost for the core team is high. We've tried that for Mautic 4 but it was reverted as we wanted to firstly prepare the easy way to install plugins. That's where the marketplace came to be. It's still very immature as no company hosting Mautic really wants it. They install plugins differently and some do not support plugins at all. All companies also see it as a security risk to let users install 3rd party plugins. I want to say that the development of the marketplace is slow but there is some new movement with the GSoC students.
About the naming, the marketplace started to use Composer which is the standard tool to install dependencies in the PHP world. It has open repository of packages. So now we have the packages keyword in the marketplace. A package can be either plugin or a theme.
Then there are special kind of plugins called integrations. Those extend special integration interface that enables plugins to easily implement authentication to another system and even custom field mapping configuration. Perhaps that's what you call External Services? Can we call it integrations? But those are still plugins. In other words, integrations are subset of plugins. Plugins and themes are subset of packages.
Loading comments ...