The Purple Plugin Pack

About the Plugin Pack

The Purple Plugin Pack was originally created by Gary Kramlich and Stu Tomlinson as a way to distribute their ever growing lists of simple Pidgin plugins. It has since grown from its origins of about 6 plugins to nearly 50. Also, many more developers have continued to add to it, including John Bailey, Peter Lawler, Sadrul Habib Chowdhury, and most recently Richard Laager.

Plugins in the Plugin Pack

1. Album
2. Auto Accept ¹
3. Auto-rejoin (this was merged with IRC More in release 2.2.0)
4. Auto Reply
5. awaynotify ^{2 3}
6. Bash.org
7. Buddy Icon Tools
8. Buddy List Options
9. Broadcast
10. Buddy Note ¹
11. buddytime ^{2 3}
12. chronic ^{2 3}
13. Conversation Badger
14. convcolors ^{1 3}
15. DeWYSIWYGification ³
16. Dice
17. DiffTopic
18. Magic 8 Ball
19. Enhanced History
20. Flip
21. gRIM
22. Group Message
23. Hide Conversation - This plugin no longer builds by default; we feel its functionality is superseded by Pidgin's persistent conversation support.
24. Highlight
25. Ignore
26. IRC Helper
27. IRC More
28. Irssi Features
29. Last Seen
30. List Handler
31. Marker Line ¹
32. My Status Box
33. Napster Protocol
34. New Line ¹
35. Nick Said
36. Offline Message ¹
37. Old Logger
38. Plonkers
39. Schedule ²
40. Separate and Tab
41. Show Offline
42. Sim Fix
43. Slash Exec
44. Simple Network Paging Protocol (SNPP)
45. SSL Info
46. Stocker ²
47. Switch Spell
48. Timelog
49. Talk Filters
50. XMMS Remote
51. XChat-Chats

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1. 1. This plugin is now included in Pidgin's releases.
2. 2. This plugin is not yet functional.
3. 3. This plugin has not yet been given a wiki page.

Plugin Pack Version Numbering

With the release of Purple Plugin Pack 2.0.0, we have changed our version numbering scheme. The new scheme works like this:

• The format is major.minor.micro.
• The major number follows libpurple's major number. This is intended to indicate the specific version of libpurple we support with that release.
• The minor version reflects the state of the plugins list within the Plugin Pack. If we add or remove plugins, we will increment this number. Under certain circumstances determined by a quorum of our developers, massive rewrites that fundamentally change a given plugin such that the result could effectively be called removing one plugin and adding another will also cause a minor version increment. The minor version will increment by exactly one for each release in which these happen, even if multiple plugins are added/changed/rewritten.
• The micro version increments for any other changes. This includes bugfix only releases or releases in which our build system changes.

Plugin Pack FAQ

What is the Plugin Pack?

Please read the top of this page.

What dependencies does the Plugin Pack have?

The Plugin Pack has several dependencies. Obviously, libpurple is a required dependency. These plugins cannot build or function without libpurple. Some plugins require Pidgin. Since Pidgin requires both GTK+ and GLib, these plugins indirectly require them. Several of the plugins also require GTK+ directly, and all require glib directly. Since we support internationalization/localization/translations, GNU gettext is also a required dependency. The talkfilters plugin requires GNU Talk Filters in order to function, therefore it is a dependency; however, it is optional. If GNU Talk Filters is not detected during configuration, the configure script will disable the talkfilters plugin automatically. The xmmsremote plugin requires XMMS 1.x. If this is not detected during configuration, the configure script will disable the xmmsremote plugin. Other dependencies may eventually be introduced as the Plugin Pack continues to grow.

Why don't I have (plugin)?

We primarily target the newest release of Pidgin, whether or not it is a beta release. Therefore we by default disable plugins that are incompatible with the newest Pidgin release. Some plugins may also represent what we feel to be too great an abuse potential, and therefore we disable them by default in an attempt to reduce such abuse. We define abuse potential as the ability to use a plugin to engage in spimming activities, which we take an extremely dim view upon. Also, an author may have forgotten to enable the building of a plugin by default. It is possible to build and install any missing plugins yourself, particularly if you built from source to begin with. If some functionality has been made part of Pidgin or Finch that supersedes a plugin, we may continue to maintain the plugin but prevent it from building by default to prevent confusion between features of the plugin and features of the application.

How do I enable a plugin you have not enabled by default?

There are a few ways if you're NOT on Windows. We will cover Windows in a separate question, as it is a different process. You can touch plugindir/.build from the top level source directory and then run the configure script again; this is the easiest way. The second way is to do a for loop in your shell, similar to this for bash: for i in *; do cd $i && make && su -c 'make install' && cd ..; done. The third way is to run the configure script with the argument --with-plugins=plugin1,plugin2,...,pluginN where you specify a comma delimited list of the plugins you want to build. After running the configure script in either way mentioned here, build and install as normal.

How do I disable a plugin you have enabled by default?

There are again three ways to do this. The simplest is to be in the top level source directory and do rm plugindir/.build. The next way is a for loop in the shell to build only the plugins you want, but we will leave that as an exercise for you to figure out the syntax of. The third way is to run the configure script with the argument --with-plugins=plugin1,plugin2,...,pluginN where you specify a comma delimited list of the plugins you want to build. After running the configure script in either way mentioned here, build and install as normal.

What do you mean by "build and install as normal"?

As with any source package you install yourself, you will first use a configure script included with the source distribution to configure the package for compilation and installation. After the configure script completes, you need to run make to build it, and then possibly su -c 'make install' to install the compiled package. The su -c may not be necessary if you are installing to a location that your user account has write access to, or if you can use sudo instead.

How do I build on Windows? How do I build plugins that aren't enabled by default on Windows?

Follow the Windows Pidgin Build Instructions and get a working WinPidgin Build environment up and running. Build Pidgin. You do not have to build the installer for Pidgin. Download the Plugin Pack source distribution and extract it to pidgin-PIDGINVERSION/pidgin/plugins with tar -zxvf /path/to/plugin_pack-PPPVERSION.tar.gz while you are in pidgin-PIDGINVERSION/pidgin/plugins. Change into the Plugin Pack source directory and run make -f Makefile.mingw to compile the plugins. You can also do make -f Makefile.mingw install to copy the plugins to the win32-install-dir created during the Pidgin make process. From there you can copy the .dll files for our plugins to the Pidgin plugins directory. For plugins that aren't built by default, change into the plugin's directory and make -f Makefile.mingw to build the plugin (note that the talkfilters and xmmsremote plugins don't work on Windows), then copy the .dll to the Pidgin plugins directory.

Will you accept my plugin for the Purple Plugin Pack?

The short answer is "Maybe." The long answer is still "Maybe," but with this more detailed answer. Currently the plugins that have been added to the Plugin Pack have been added by their authors, who were already developers on the Guifications project. However, since our move from SourceForge? and the evolution of Guifications beyond a Pidgin plugin (thus causing Guifications and the Pidgin Plugins to diverge into two separate but somewhat overlapping projects), we have begun to extend offers to some plugin authors whose plugins we feel would make a positive addition to the Plugin Pack. There are numerous factors that we are considering in extending these invitations, and most, if not all, of these factors will apply in a decision on plugins whose authors approach us about inclusion in the Plugin Pack.

How do I install the Windows version? It's just a zip file!

Locate your .purple directory. This is usually in %APPDATA%\.purple. If you need to, create the plugins folder there. Drop the DLL's in this plugins folder. You could also put them in the plugins directory in the Pidgin installation directory, but Pidgin's installer will delete the plugins when you upgrade Pidgin; thus the .purple directory is a safer location to preserve your plugins across Pidgin updates.

Where is the documentation for the Plugin Pack? What about the plugins?

You're looking at it. Above is a list of the plugins with links to their wiki pages. If the documentation is insufficient, you can improve it. If you don't already have an account, register for one, log in, and then edit the pages needing improvements. If you do edit the pages, please try to follow the same conventions we use so that the wiki has a consistent feel to it.

What version of Pidgin does the Purple Plugin Pack work with?

The Windows zip file will generally be compiled for the newest Pidgin version available at release time. Most of the plugins will build against Pidgin 2.0.0, however. If you have trouble building against Pidgin releases older than the most recent but equal to or newer than Pidgin 2.0.0, let us know by opening a ticket.

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Ticket System

Open Plugin Pack Bugs

#304

Ignorance plugin needs some more TLC

#333

Crashing when quitting Pidgin - mystatusbox plugin

#378

NickSaid doesn't work consistently or properly

#381

SNPP crash on exit

#406

Auto-Reply "only when there's no autoreply message".

#430

Infopane options always show tab working inconsistently

#442

Crash on manual quit on windows

#444

List Handler - ICQ contacts import

#451

nicksaid plugin should clear history when user clears conversation scrollback in pidgin

#452

Slashexec doesn't escape output before sending

#462

conversation badger

#463

Pidgin crashes on shutdown

#474

dewysiwyg

#500

Switch spell changes language in current chat when other chat is opened

#503

Infopane Options plugin crashes Pidgin when closing IRC window

#504

Autoaccept does not work for IRC

#507

Show Offline: icons hidden if "hide empty groups" selected

Open PluginPack Feature Requests

#329

options for the IRC-helper plugin

#363

regex plugin

#376

organize status messages

#414

Break apart long messages

#418

Hide Existing Conversations When Away?

#419

Would like a "status rotater" plugin

#456

Groupmsg listing issue

#457

List handler for accounts

#458

Quickfilter

#466

EasyTyping

#475

Enhance buddy list

#484

Option of CTRL+V to act as 'paste as simple text'

#497

add existing 'Character counting plugin' for Pidgin (good for Twitter and general usage)

#498

Rectify last messages

#506

Rhythmbox current song plugin

Open PluginPack Patches

#380

Language pack (french and spanish) for purple plugin pack 2.0

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Pages linking to PluginPack:

• DeveloperStuff
• Guifications
• WikiStart
• album
• gsoc
• irchelper

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Last Modified on Wed Mar 26 23:22:57 2008 by jbailey (7 weeks ago)