Plugins that are unsupported should be phased out

[douglas]

There are a number of plugins in Xinha that are very old. Some are no longer used, some are deprecated, and some are even broken. We should move these to an unsupported directory and add support for loading these plugins from there.

By doing this, we can phase out old and broken code without any performance impact to users who don't use the plugins, and without any functionality loss if there are users who do.

To that end, I'll create an unsupported directory, and modify the loader to check that directory only if it fails to load it from the supported directory.

Here is a list of plugins scheduled to be moved to the unsupported directory. Please modify this ticket to make changes:

Plugin	Reason
Template	totally unconfigurable and thus unusable for anything
InsertPicture?	broken since long (use editor.config.URIs.insert_image, a feature that fell out of support accidentially, sorry for that). Plus we should not waste energy by supporting several plugins that serve the same task
Filter	broken, superseded by SuperClean
HtmlTidy	superseded by SuperClean
InsertMarquee	God, we cannot have a plugin for any outdated HTML stuff
BackgroundImage?	same here
ClientsideSpellcheck	implements support for some (probably old) third-party, proprietary, IE-only spellcheck engine. I don't think that's what we are in for
NoteServer	Broken, and so I doubt it has any users

[ray]

I think this would be a good move, as it doesn't appeal much to potential new users if they test the plugins and there are loads of crap ones

So here's my list

Plugin	Reason
Template	totally unconfigurable and thus unusable for anything
InsertPicture?	broken since long (use editor.config.URIs.insert_image, a feature that fell out of support accidentially, sorry for that). Plus we should not waste energy by supporting several plugins that serve the same task
Filter	broken, superseded by SuperClean
HtmlTidy	superseded by SuperClean
InsertNote?	does anyone use this, does it work at all?
InsertMarquee	God, we cannot have a plugin for any outdated HTML stuff
BackgroundImage?	same here
ClientsideSpellcheck	implements support for some (probably old) third-party, proprietary, IE-only spellcheck engine. I don't think that's what we are in for

[douglas]

r1072 Updates Xinha to handle unsupported plugins. The list of unsupported plugins is now updated to reflect what has been moved. InsertNote? is actually a new plugin just added by nicholasbs to handle footnoting, so it has an active maintainer.

Replying to ray:

I think this would be a good move, as it doesn't appeal much to potential new users if they test the plugins and there are loads of crap ones

[ray]

Replying to douglas:

InsertNote? is actually a new plugin just added by nicholasbs to handle footnoting, so it has an active maintainer.

Sorry, I was confused; I meant NoteServer.

Doug, shouldn't the folder be named unsupportedplugins?

[douglas]

r1076 Changes the direcotry name, and adds NoteServer to the list of unsupported plugins