Simplify Plug-in Creation

Hi there, I know a lot of your time is spent on creating and updating all the plug-ins that people request, and I thought I would put forward an idea that you may or may not have considered previously to help in this matter.
I would assume that this idea should be quite easy to implement (particularly for premium accounts, or those filehosts that do not require CAPTCHA).
This idea is - To make a generic plug-in system that would get all the required info for any given site from an associated configuration file similar to, if not exactly like, the old Windows INI file (or XML file may be better option).
This would mean that anyone with simple HTML knowledge could create and update plug-ins for any such site.
I have viewed your screencast tutorial on plug-in creation and can't see why the base plug-in template code could not be modified to read values from a config file instead of having such info hard-coded.
e.g. for the example filesend.net the config (INI) file could look something like:

Language: INI
[FILESEND.NET]
PLUGIN_VERSION="1.0"
MIN_FRD_VERSION="0.81"
MAX_FRD_VERSION="0.849"
URL_REGEX="http://www\.)?filesend\.net/download.php.+"
SERVICE_NAME="filesend.net"
FAVICON_IMAGE="resources/favicon.png"
WAIT_TIME_SECONDS="20"
MAX_DL_FROM_ONE_IP="8"
RUNCHECK="TRUE"
FILENAME_MATCHER="File Name:</strong>\\s*(.+?)\\s*</td>"
FILESIZE_MATCHER="File Size:</strong>\\s*(.+?)\\s*</td>"
FILE_PROBLEM="File not found"
FILE_REQUEST_TYPE="POST"
DL_LINK_EXTRACTION="method=\"POST\" action=\"(http.+?)\""
SID_REQUIRED="TRUE"
SID_MATCHER="sid"

Anyway, that's my idea on how you could let more people be involved with plug-in creation and save a lot of your own time with developing the main FRD program. Cheers, debug.

The issue is that services differ hugely. There's no standard which defines when waiting time should be applied, for example.

An interesting thing is that most smaller hosts are based on a script called XFileSharing Pro, and only differ a little from each other. Unfortunately the differences are in the critical parts, so an universal plugin cannot be made.

I have thought of a wild universal plugin which would guess it's way through a page, but I don't think it it'd be reasonable.

Hi ntoskrnl,
I understand your point, and agree that services can differ greatly, I have used your tutorial on plug-in creation as the basis of my configuration file above, but believe that even the most complicated should be able to be automated as long as the underlying functionality is there (as modular components) in your template that may be called dynamically through calls made based on config items. The key would be to create the smallest functional units that may be called independently.
e.g. your very simple example of when wait time is required can be handled in a manner similar to steps 3 and 7 below:

Language: INI
[EXAMPLE.COM]
[STEP_1]
FUNCTION="CONNECT"
...
[STEP_2]
FUNCTION="VALIDATE"
URL_REGEX="http://www\.)?example\.com/download.php.+"
...
[STEP_3]
FUNCTION="WAIT"
WAIT_TIME_SECONDS="20"
...
[STEP_5]
FUNCTION="REQUEST_FILE"
FILE_REQUEST_TYPE="POST"
DL_LINK_EXTRACTION="method=\"POST\" action=\"(http.+?)\""
SID_REQUIRED="TRUE"
SID_MATCHER="sid"
...
[STEP_7]
FUNCTION="WAIT"
WAIT_TIME_SECONDS="5"
...

I know you are very experienced (creating FRD and it's associated plug-ins prove this) and you are sure to have thought about this before - and your wild universal predictive plug-in sounds very interesting; but I just want to raise this for more consideration and maybe with new fresh eyes or ideas that you may not have considered (or have considered, but have discarded or dismissed that may be worth another look.

Anyway, thanks for the quick response and keep up the good work! Cheers, debug.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/09/2010 03:32PM by debug.

This is not a simplification. You cannot debug it, watch debug messages etc. 70% sites are very specific. It's not possible to create something universal to use as you want. Also a Captcha and beating Captcha is another problem...

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