responsibility & communication of plugins

[felixhaeberle]

Overall, the communication and responsibility of plugins is a mess.

1. Some do only provide message loading/saving.
2. Some do only provide matching functionality for Sherlock.
3. Some do both.

3 is the coolest of them, BUT at the cost of flexibility (can only import from one format), code duplication (same JSON parsing code in every package).

@samuel.stroschein :
The website (cc @nils.jacobsen) just misses a "this plugin defines xyz" section and explainer what x,y, or z do on the product page. I did a sketch a while ago but can't find it anymore.

[samuelstroschein]

Yeah, the website should have a "this plugin defines api x, y, z" upon clicking on x, y, or z, the docs open with an explainer what this plugin api does

[NilsJacobsen]

As a user most of the time, I just want to make my legacy lib compatible with the ecosystem. Therefore I need a library-plugins (next-Intl-plugin, vue-i18n-plugin). That is wasy to understand and comes with all I need to make it work.

[NilsJacobsen]

Yeah, the website should have a "this plugin defines api x, y, z" upon clicking on x, y, or z, the docs open with an explainer what this plugin api does

This information should be somewhere, but I think for the most people that will be to complex as the first thing they read.

What about multiple section on the plugin page.

1. Library plugins
2. Matcher

They will immediately click on their lib logo, and are there.

[samuelstroschein]

@nils.jacobsen your comment is unrelated to the issue. the issue is "what apis does this plugin define?"

[NilsJacobsen]

Well, the problem is that people are confused about which plugin to take.

Second day (probably third day) problem:

• Really understand what's going on inside a plugin

I don't think that a huge percentage does have this problem, but your proposal should work for them. At least if we don't get too many APIs.

[NilsJacobsen]

Where are the APIs linking to in your sketch?

[samuelstroschein]

https://inlang.com/documentation/plugin/api

[felixhaeberle]

see also https://discord.com/channels/897438559458430986/1084866749842870333/1247389185862533220 where user has issue identifying how to get Sherlock to work. This happens on a weekly basis, and probably much more silently.

[NilsJacobsen]

What module is your create project button adding?

[felixhaeberle]

@NilsJacobsen https://github.com/opral/monorepo/blob/e29b3361db6994a489beaac3acd116c9ce609877/inlang/source-code/sdk/src/defaultProjectSettings.ts#L7

[NilsJacobsen]

So they add it that way and then are stuck if they want to do something else than messageFormat?

[felixhaeberle]

This is not the issue here, it is not clear which plugin provides which functionality resulting in people run with too many/too few plugins. If we would outline this on the website, there would be an understanding which APIs are covered by which module.

[NilsJacobsen]

Besides that (we agreed on adding it -> moved to TODO), how many users use the create button? Is it the legacy users that get into this problem? Why are there that many day-two-problem users? Best case they don't have to think about the issue until they are pro users.