Status as of 2012

• Mods is code in SVN: http://tikiwiki.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tikiwiki/mods/trunk/
• Most of the mods are abandonware and most of the good stuff was merged into core a long time ago but there are a handful of useful/maintained mods which are not in core because of licensing
• Mods can't deal with versioning
• Mods can't deal with translations
• The Mods installer hasn't been improved in years and it's unlikely someone will step up.
• Mods installer can't work in some places because of file permissions

The Idea

• Mods is a packaging/distribution tool for files managed in a SCM (SVN). Instead, profiles could be used to deploy and wiki pages could become the SCM, with a nice Web-based source code editor

No change

• The license of the content can be GPL because the user installs themselves

Benefits

• Contributors can contribute via the browser (especially interesting for translators)
• We would be using maintained code

Challenges

Translations

• How to sync SVN with the wiki?
• Translation branching strategy
• How does get strings and other tools need adapting?

Binairies

• How to deal with binairies?
  • Profiles could be improved to handle binairies
    • Tiki_logo_in_base_64 was made from http://www.greywyvern.com/code/php/binary2base64

File permissions

• mods has a web installer
  • PluginArchiveBuilder can generate the zip on demand of a bunch of files and we let people install themselves if file permissions are an issue

Long term

• We could imagine moving translations completely to this, but we would need to upgrade our scripts

Related

• To Mods Or Not To Mods