Plugins System

[rumblefrog]

This is an extension of my suggestion in #1, where users can just drop plugins into the backend and then activate it.

Detailed Description

This is a system where users can optionally add plugins/extensions from the author and enabling it via the frontend, allowing the community to publish and maintain their plugin instead of relying on the core team.

Context

I have seen many suggestions before in the v1 repo: asking more features to be added to the core; Features that most people won't even use, therefore adding bloat to the core.

The core should only contain things that are necessary to make SourceBans work like a ban system and nothing more.

This minimalist idea prevents the core from being filled with entropy (cause slower processing & unnecessary memory usage) and making the UI more complicated than it already is.

Users can easily install & activate plugins to suit their needs and customize to their desire. Users no longer need to wait for the core team to implements the features, but instead able to hire someone or do it themselves to create plugins.

Possible Implementation

Senario 1

I have seen this idea implemented on https://github.com/flarum/flarum

They use composer to automatically install plugins, handy if you're using Laravel/Lumen for the backend.

Senario 2

You could also just allow the users to drag and drop plugins into a folder, in which could be activated via the front-end panel. With activated plugins stored in a database.

Senario 3 (Best?)

A front-end marketplace (Flarum is implementing this, and CloudFlare already has done it), where you can fetch from a repo of just plugins, and install them from the repo data. Plugin authors can create a pull request for their plugins, and users can create issues requesting plugins in that repo, and keeping plugins all in one repo.