Hi!

I am happy to announce some new features now available in the Moodle plugins directory. I am particularly happy today for these, not only because they were lurking on the todo list for a while. But primarily because they were often suggested by you - the marvelous Moodle community members Let's have a look what just landed.

Plugin translation stats

There is a new tab Translations on every plugin's page. It gives the information about the number of text strings defined by the plugin and registered with the AMOS - the Moodle translation tool. And even more, there is also a chart with translations stats of the given plugin. That is, into what languages the plugin is translated and what is the translation completeness ratio.

The existing link to contribute translations for the given plugin has been moved from the Useful links section on the plugin's main page to this new Translations page.

Strings are registered asynchronously with AMOS

Originally, the strings defined by the plugin were registered automatically as a part of releasing a new plugin version (or editing the existing version record). This could occasionally lead to delays in the release process as the maintainer had to wait for the AMOS to process the new strings. If there was a problem with strings registration, it was not logged. Making it more challenging for the maintainer to remember what the error message was.

Recently, this integration with AMOS has been rewritten so that it happens asynchronously in the background via a scheduled task. Every time a new plugin version is released, or the existing version record is updated, the plugin is marked as "Pending" and it is scheduled for re-check with AMOS. Shortly, typically within minutes, a scheduled task runs in the background that processes such pending plugins.

Starting from today, the plugin's Developer zone page contains a log of all these asynchronous updates of the plugin's strings with AMOS - together with their status. This allows the maintainers to make sure the plugin strings are registered correctly and are ready to be translated by the community translators.

Public list of not yet approved plugins

This idea has been reopened again during the recent discussions in this forum. Shortly, a new report is now available at Plugins > Reports > Not yet approved plugins page. All the plugins that have been submitted to the Plugins directory but are not yet approved, are listed there. Together with the links to the approval issue in the tracker and the plugin's native Git repository. Please refer to the other thread for details on why and when this can be useful.

Improved display of the plugin's previous versions

And yet another suggestion was brought in during the great DevJam session at the Moodle MootDE17 in Mannheim. Alexander Bias, a recognized Moodle community developer, came with solid reasons why the current display of all the plugin versions - including all those very old or even hidden ones - is not helpful and makes the page confusing. Especially for plugins with a long development history with many releases.

Finally, today's update brings a new display of the plugin's previous versions. Their list is now presented via a drop-down menu. It still allows the user to find details about a particular legacy version if it is needed. But the list of these versions is not that prominent any more and the users are encouraged to download and install latest versions only, as it should be.

Many thanks everybody for your useful suggestions and ideas on how to make Moodle even more awesome project