Will's blog

You've just finished the most fantastic plugin ever and you want to give it to everyone! Woah Nelly--before you distribute it, think of these things!!!

First off, you should make sure you have some kind of license statement in the plugin. What can users do with the plugin? Can they modify and redistribute it? Do they have to pay for usage? Blah blah blah (feel free to steal my license statement).

Second, you should have a copyright notice in the plugin header so people know who owns it.

Third, in order for people to know which version they have and thereby recognize when there is a new version and such, you should have the following items:

• __author__ - who wrote the plugin
• __version__ - what version is this (and i include a date of when I released it as well)
• __url__ - the url of where they can find this plugin or information about this plugin
• __description__ - a one-line description of the plugin

Then you should include instructions on how to set up the plugin (any config.py parameters that need to be set, any flavour files that need to be created, other data files that need to exist, ...), how to use the plugin (what variables it might expose to templates, urls that it does things with, ...), and whatever other documentation the user would want to know.

Doing all of this will help the user know what they've downloaded, how to use it, what it does do, what it doesn't do, how to figure out when a new version is out, and what rights they have.

For examples, look at the headers of all my plugins in my plugin index.

changelog

• v.1.0 (27 January, 2004) - wrote the tip