padre gets a new plugin manager

padre, the perl ide, has a plugin system, allowing people to extend it to suit their needs. plugins are written in perl (not in a dumbed down language), and thus one can leverage the whole cpan to extend padre. and since there is a parrot plugin, one can even write plugins in any language supported by the parrot virtual machine. but i digress...

to manage those plugins, and enable / disable them at will, padre is shipping a plugin manager. until now, here's how it looked like:



not really sexy - in fact, it was pretty ugly. and the screenshot has not been taken with all padre plugins available - in this case, the window grows absurdely and expands way beyond the screen edges. not to mention that current plugin manager incarnation is not really useful to know what a plugin really does...

so i worked on it and totally revamped the plugin manager. after much fighting with wxwidgets (and i did not win every time... :-|), here's the result, as available in trunk:



as you can see, the available plugins are now in a list, scaling up quite well with the number of padre plugins that we expect to see in the future. moreover, the plugin status icons show immediately which plugins are currently enabled. finally, there's a space on the right of the window to display the plugin documentation.

what's not visible in above screenshot is that one can sort the plugins on their version and status. and that plugins can now provide their own icon, instead of the default one. now that it has been implemented in the plugin manager, i expect plugins to start using this opportunity quite soon to stand apart...

all in all, i'm quite happy with the new plugin manager. it will be available in next padre release, which should arrive soon. and if you have new wishes or remarks, i invite you to report those bugs / requests to padre's ticket center.