Suggestion for a Cacti Plugin/Template Site

[phalek]

Hi,

I know that the repository should be providing this, but I haven't seen any progress there for quite some time now. So here I am suggesting the following to provide a better platform for the plugins and templates available for cacti:

I like to have a page providing the following:

• Description of the plugin
  
• List of compatibility to cacti version / PIA version
  
• Link to the cacti forum entry
  
• Installation Walk-Through, HowTos and eventually some Flash Demos
  
• A Search function
  
• Categorize each plugin/template to fin them easier ( e.g. LAN/Server Monitoring, Graph Enhancements ...)
  

I stated with a very early page for nmidSmokeping to give some idea of what I mean. See here: nmidSmokeping Plugin Site

I think this would make things easier for ppl to find, install and run the plugins or templates.

Any suggestions/discussions on this are welcome.

[Howie]

I think this is especially useful for templates more than plugins.. the 'best post' is badly formatted if you jump in halfway down it.

For it to really have value, it would need to be updated to point to the latest version as it got posted, so you don't have to wade through 15 pages of forum posts to figure out if you have the current version of the template/plugin, and if it will actually work on your system.

It's also tricky to work out compatibility between versions of Cacti/PA, since you can't get old versions of the PA, and I don't think there's a history of which hooks were added when, and which versions of PA are for which Cacti, is there? For example, I *think* weathermap will work on anything back to PA 1.0, apart from a couple of features, but I can't easily check.

[phalek]

For compatbility we could at least use the ones availabe here. I hope folks don't have old PIAs lying around and try to install those.

For sure there are users who didn't update to a newer version so they may stick with 1.0 but one has to make a cut somewhere.

At least this would provide an overview of what PIAs the plugin will work on.

You right in that it's really difficult to get the latests version of a plugin/template from a post. Sometimes fixes/addons or even never version aren't posted in the first post, but as a reply somewhere in between. Maybe providing a naming convention (e.g. plugin_<name>_<version>_<build>_<flavour>.<tar.gz|zip> ) will help, or providing an upload functionality or pure manual work ...

As a very long term goal a repository normally should provide the ability to select and automatically install plugins or templates from it, but that means that the target cacti/PIA combination needs to be compatible with the plugin ...