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Plugin manifest file convention

We will be making it possible for users to be notified through Studio of an updated plugin that is made available on the SDL Appstore.  In order for this to work effectively it is important that all developers who list their plugins on the Store follow a particular convention.  The AppStore team will notify all developers of this requirement when they send their plugins in for signing.

The reason for this requirement is that there is a strong connection between the pluginpackage.manifest information and the plugin plugin record from the Store. In order to have a better user experience (read: for this to work!) on the AppStore website we have put in place some conventions, which will be described bellow.

Description

Is important that the Description from the manifest file is meaningful.  This will be seen in the plugin manager and will be used as we continue to develop the integration of the AppStore into Studio.

Plugin name

The plugin name from the manifest file should match the name of the plugin from the AppStore.  Aside from the obvious inconsistency the notifications will not work if this doesn't match.

Incorrect

Pluginpackage.manifest.xml

AppStore web site

Correct

Plugin version

Because there are multiple versions of Studio available, the plugin version should be different for each Version of Studio.

Incorrect

Correct

The convention for the plugin version on the AppStore record is as follows:

Version Number ( Studio Version) 

No extra special character should be added in the App Record.

The version number itself should follow the semantic versioning specification as follows:

  • MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
  • MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner,
  • PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes, and
  • INTERNAL version as the builds are released to testing

This means the following would be unnacceptable for example:

1.0
2.4.1

They should be:

1.0.0.0
2.4.1.0

This may not be the convention used by everyone but in order to ensure the best possible experience for users this is the convention to be followed.  It will mean that users will be notified correctly when there is an update available to a plugin that is currently being used in Studio, for example: