As was initially announced at the October 2014 developer meeting, we were working on the Plugins directory improvements that would allow plugin maintainers to easily release new plugin versions based on Git tags. I am happy to announce some progress on this feature.
The Plugins directory now integrates with Github, the most popular hosting site for Moodle plugins code. When adding a new version of a plugin, the list of available tags are fetched from the Github and presented in a drop-down menu.
Selecting the tag and pressing the "Release" button does two things:
- The ZIP of the tagged version is loaded into the filepicker so that you do not need to upload it manually.
- The fields VCS tag, Changelog URL and Alternate download URL are automatically pre-populated with a reasonable value.
To be able to use this new feature, you just have to make sure that the Source control URL field of your plugin record points to the Github repository of the plugin. And of course, you have to tag your code in advance. You can read more on Git tags in their documentation.
Together with this improvement, we also slightly changed another feature. As you probably know, the contents of the README file is used as the default value of the Release notes for the new version. From now on, if there is a file called CHANGES in the root of your repository, it will be used instead of the README file as the source for the release notes. Extensions .md, .txt, .htm and .html are supported, too (with Markdown being recommended as it proved to lead to well formatted text in both web and text terminal interface).
I hope you will enjoy these small yet nice improvements.
