Lately I've been looking for some place to host my plugins that also supports some form of VCS. I'd been looking at github and bitbucket, along with just getting frustrated with the idea of leaning how to even use VCS in general. Then I started thinking about a site that I frequented a lot while I was playing World of Warcraft, curse.com. Now it turns out that curse.com isn't dedicated to only WoW. Apparently they are interested in hosting plugins/addons for all games.

curseforge.com is the developer side of the curse.com equation. They offer project management via VCS (git, subversion, mercurial), project wikis, and bug tracking and it all appears to be free from what I've seen so far. Plus, projects are automatically syndicated on curse.com. And they have a namespace for VO projects already created.

The only draw back I've seen to the site is that they actively try to ensure that the person starting the project is actually an author of the project, which can take a little bit of time. Additionally, if you choose to upload your own zip files, rather than using their VCS and packager, they like to check them before they go live which can cause further delay.

Any thoughts?

I'd be willing to try it, but I doubt that matters since I've only published one plugin that nobody else uses (to my knowledge) :P

I'm planning to put DroidButtons up there first (if I ever get this GUI rewrite done) followed by DevKit and possibly some of my smaller ones.

I just started a new plugin (DopplerHostility) through them. I'm still waiting for them to approve it. I don't like how they say "Our administrators will be reviewing your project any minute now" when the potential wait time can be multiple hours at least (three so far).

What is the benefit in using these guys rather than github (which I have not yet tried)? Is it just a matter of more gamer traffic that might notice and be shunted over here? Also, it doesn't look like they have a way to browse inside a repo within the web browser. That's a feature that github supports, which can be useful for just taking a peek at how somebody else implemented something, or seeing what literal changes happened, without having to clone the whole repo locally.

I think I may be too impatient to use curseforge. Am gonna go look at github. (That's something I need to do anyway, for other non-plugin projects.)

Well, I did mention that the time to get an project approved was a potential downside. It's not like you can just quickly start up a project and be good to go.

Part of my interest in them is certainly wider exposure. From a user perspective they also provide their curse-client which can simplify installation (Windows and Mac).

I'd also hoped to get a little more dialogue regarding this site after people had a chance to look it over. Certainly no single solution is going to necessarily be right for everyone. For instance, I've tried the VOUPR and didn't care for it, but that doesn't mean it isn't still a viable distribution point.

I can see how not being able to quickly browse the repo from a browser could be somewhat of a hassle, and has actually be a little bit of an annoyance to me as I've been curious to see how some WoW addons work. It's certainly not a deal breaker though.

Another point of interest is their packager (described here). If libraries start to become more common place, you can use the packager to automatically pull-in all of the files you need from various repos of dissimilar types and locations.

EDIT: I'd also like to point out that I recently registered my DroidButtons project and was approved within an hour. I'm not sure what the actual time-frame was, since my email server has some amount of delay as it performs various scans and checks.

I figured I should mention that you can apparently also specify an external repository if you would prefer to host your repo elsewhere.

I don't think they like me. When I created the project I set it as experimental because I didn't know if it would work, and I figured the delay would be shorter (I figured they'd save the hard look for when I try to shift it over to release mode). I got it basically finished last night before they'd approved it at all, and then made some adjustments this morning after they'd approved it as experimental, and resubmitted it in release mode. That was ten hours ago.

*edit: they finally approved it, a total of 16 hours after it was submitted.

le sigh

I'm just going to stick with what works for me I think.

Hey, I like this since it makes plugin management much easier for those that need it to be easier. However, The Projects Page could use a better icon. I suggest:



Aside from that it looks pretty cool and hopefully it all works well. I don't play on windows or mac so I still have to do things the hard way but I think it's cool guys.

~Interstellar

I'm not in favor of using that icon. Sure, we all recognize it, but it wouldn't mean anything to people who haven't played VO.

Also, I'm not finding the projects you two created on curse.com. Is it because they are still in the planning stage, or does it just take a while for the syndication? I didn't see any obvious way to download from curseforge.com and didn't feel like downloading the client.

Mine only got approved for syndication this morning at 3 AM. Now I'm trying to figure out how to get the packager to pump out a file. Supposedly all I need to do is tag a version using only [0-9,_\-]+, which I have done. The packager is apparently on a 30 minute cron, so I'm waiting to see if it works this time. I had already tagged a couple versions, 1.0 and 1.1, prior to being approved, and those never showed up, so I'm not sure if I was just jumping the gun or if I'm doing something wrong. (Yes, I did push the tags to the server.)

Well, even without a tag, it should have created an alpha zip for download. It'll only syndicate to curse.com once the criteria for a beta or release package has been met.

I'm not in favor of using that icon. Sure, we all recognize it, but it wouldn't mean anything to people who haven't played VO.

Well, for one, the other games use icons that people might not recognize and it's not like someone would recognize the currently used piece of crap icon any different than if it looked better by using the one I posted. And second, as previously stated, it would be alot better looking than the currently used piece of crap looking one. The icon itself doesn't need to say what game it is because it says the name right next to it.

~Interstellar

Rin, they fixed the issue with it displaying raw HTML, but they haven't yet fixed the issue of it not creating files, and here's why.

Discovered git repository: vo/droidbuttons/mainline Skipping project for unsupported game: git/vo/droidbuttons/mainline.git

So now I'm going to submit another ticket to request they add support for it.

They declined your ticket. The fact that they support multiple games yet don't have a maintainable way to deal with random games using a plugin format as dirt-simple as VO's is confusing at best.

That's annoying, but I may yet decide to continue using it. We can still upload pre-packaged zip files to the site and have them distributed. It's just a bit more annoying.