Plugin Wizard

About

With Dashboard 5.4.0 we changed the way how Dashboard install/update plugins

With our plugins getting more smarter and advanced everyday, they get more and more dependencies from each other in order for these plugins to work And with these more dependencies it become a hassle and harder to fix actions/portals mappings and configs for each plugin once its installed/updated

Here Wizard come in place 🤖

Dashboard Wizard will help you to auto map dependencies from actions and portals and auto install/update required plugins for the targeted plugin that you want to install/update

Wizard feature only supports plugins with the latest manifest structure with manifest version: 1.0.0 and higher

For more info, check out manifestVersion page in Dashboard Plugin doc

How it works

Once you try to install/update a plugin, Dashboard Wizard will perform three main actions

Collecting dependencies
Checking for requirements
Resolving requirements

Once these three actions are done, Wizard will display an overview on what are the collected dependencies if there are any and what requirements these dependencies asking for

Along with what is supported and whats not and what Wizard can auto-map and what can't

Collecting dependencies

It will start to look for sup dependencies from other plugins Such like a plugin that is expected to expose action/portal to be used

It will start queuing these plugin dependencies into install queue if that plugin is not installed or queuing em into update queue if the plugin is already installed

Checking for requirements

It will start to check for all the requirements from all the collected dependencies and sort em on what is supported and what can be auto-mapped

Resolving requirements

It will start auto-map all the checked requirements for all the dependencies and start resolving all the actions/portals for all of em

You are always able to install/update your plugin even if the Wizard failed to collect/check/resolve any of the plugin's requirements

Except for if the Wizard failed to fetch your plugin's manifest 🙃

How to use

Wizard feature doesn't require any switching or config to work Wizard feature replaces the current way to install/update plugins in Dashboard

In this example we will try to install Newsroom Planner in an empty Dashboard

Wizard will handle installing all the dependencies that required to run Newsroom Planner along with auto-map all the requirements for it and all the other dependencies with the correct actions/portals

Navigate to Plugin Store and click on Add tab and enter your plugin url and click on fetch

Once Dashboard done with fetching your plugin's manifest, it will display an About Plugin view that you can see all the information about your plugin that you trying to install

Scrolling to the "Requirements" section, you can see all the plugin's requirements that it asked for before taking any action

After fetching the manifest click on Next so the Wizard can start it's actions

You can see from the logs that the Wizard collected all the required dependencies to run NRP from Content-Agent to Naviga-Photos plugins

Dashboard Wizard will always tries to collect all the dependencies even for the sub ones that requested from the installed/updated plugin and tries to check/resolve all their requirements

there you can see at the bottom of each step of the logs in our NRP example that the Wizard also collected Concept Admin plugin

Which is not required for NRP to work but it is a sup dependency of Naviga Photo plugin

After the Wizard is done with all it's actions click on Next

After clicking on Next you will see an overview on all the collected dependencies along with all the requirements that they asked for and what will be installed and what will be updated

Overview

In each overview the Wizard will display each plugin by it's own section

Under each one the Wizard will sort and group the requirements for each plugin in five variants

Supported requirements
Unknown support for requirements
Not supported requirements
Missing requirements
Failed to fetch

Supported requirements

Once a requirement is marked as a "supported requirements" it means that Wizard successfully collected all the needs for it and resolved it and auto-mapped with the correct action/portal

Or it means that the dependency doesn't has any requirement to run.

Unknown support for requirements

Once a requirement is marked as a "unknown support for requirements" it means that Wizard successfully collected it's needs but couldn't to resolve em and Wizard couldn't auto-map it

Either for lacking dependencies info in the manifest or it failed to fetch the targeted manifest to solve these requirements.

Not supported requirements

Once a requirement is marked as a "not supported requirements" it means that Wizard successfully collected it's needs but the requested requirements can't be solved and don't met any of the collected once

Missing requirements

Once a requirement is marked as a "missing requirements" it means that Wizard couldn't collect and of it's needs due to the collected manifest is not supported for Wizard

Failed to fetch

Once a requirement is marked as a "failed to fetch" it means that Wizard couldn't fetch it's manifest in order to collect/check

Auto mapping

Wizard will auto map all the supported requirements actions/portals once its collected

But you have the ability to choose to skip auto-map all or some of the supported requirements if you would like to run the plugin with your own mapping "actions/portals" solutions

In the supported requirements overview you will see a checkbox beside each required action/portal all the supported once will be checked by default, but you can uncheck the once that you don't want Wizard to auto-map for you

If you are trying to update an installed plugin that already has a mapped requirements, Wizard wont override or change the already mapped actions/portals

Its only auto-map the new or the missing ones

Switch installing/updating plugins on/off

Once the Wizard collect all the dependencies you will see them all listed and queued as plugins to install or plugins to update if they are already installed

If you wish to skip installing/updating the collected dependencies, you can do so by toggling the switch button off for the desired dependency

You can't switch the main plugin off, only sup dependencies can be turned off

Skipping auto-mapping and switching plugins off is a good way to skip optional requirements for your plugin