Pale Moon forum

Hi kids!

*sound of crickets*

Heh...

So, this Phoebus thing... It's a way of storing information about add-ons for use on APO?

What is Phoebus 2.0, and is that a fancy new search feature for the add-ons site that I see in that screenshot there?

Project Phoebus IS the software written from the ground up to drive the Pale Moon Add-ons Site which first landed on November 8th 2016.

It replaced the quite badly abused CMS made Simple + a smattering of scripts originally used back in 2014.

Also, Yes. Yes it is.

Sweet! I assume this will make the add-ons site more scalable and maintainable going forward.

Will the search feature return results for extensions, themes, search plugins, and language packs all at once? And if so, will they the results be filterable by add-on type?

Basic Search Functionality will be limited to Extensions and Themes (even though I dunno why I am including themes.. All themes are on one page).. Language Packs are a special case as are Search Plugins .. also all of those fit in one screen so not yet

I will in time improve search so you can select the type of add-on, i guess and perhaps even category as well.. But I want to get this search basically back to the equivalent state it was back on the CMSMS-Hybrid mess I created in 2014. Improvements will come over time.

As for scalability.. I suppose yes.. Using SQL will help that significantly and also remove several blockers.. FTP will die, Add-on Developers will be able to register accounts and submit/update add-ons (extensions and themes) from a developer panel on the site. A lot of redundant code for (user) error checking and mangling will not be necessary anymore and it will be simple and webby and awesome!

The burden for the Add-ons Team will also be reduced and manual work will be almost eliminated.

I am planning to be finished with Phoebus 2.0 by the end of the year.. However, holidays are here and it all does rely on my self being in the right sort of.. coding mood.. Though, I been pretty good about that as of late. So I am sticking with end of the year as a target date for now..

Alright, that's cool.

What about Phoebus files in add-ons? Are those for storing information for the Phoebus of the add-ons site to read?

Currently, yes.. They are going to be deprecated and eventually purged.. All the data is going into a table in an sql database. Which the development version of the site is using right now.. I had to write a VERY annoying migration script to do the work.. It was annoying. Additionally, it was annoying. But it works .. annoyingly.

Yeah, all that info on the wiki regarding Phoebus files and submission will be obsolete.. All will be done from the soon-to-be-written Add-on Developer Panel.

Slightly off topic, but related. From what I can tell, the search feature in about:addons only searches AMO for available add-ons. Are there plans to include APO in those search results in the future? Will the 2.0 upgrade make it easier to implement such a feature?

Yes, We will be able to do integration searches from the Add-ons Manager but that WILL cost us the ability to use AMO.. Although, as most know, AMO will become useless after the great purge coming sometime next year.

Unlike AUS it is one or the other.. I am not sure when the Add-on Team wants to sever those pass-through services for our own.

Although I never stopped working on the software development of Phoebus or funding the server.. Ryan (Lootyhoof) became Leader of the Add-ons Team as of last year. So it is up to the Add-ons Team and ultimately Moonchild for when that happens..

See Issue #1552.
I'm good with switching whenever the infra is ready.