Hi,

I am hooking a plugin I am writing to SignShop. The plugin tracks Minecraft Server stuff to Google Analytics. With SignShop I'll be tracking transactions through as if they were ecommerce transactions on a website. Should give some nice metrics.

https://github.com/nyvaria/OpenAnalytics

(Note that the code currently checked in to do this is incomplete)

Of course, I ran into the "no maven repo" thing. Somewhere I read in one of your issues or whatnot on Bukkit dev that you intended to mavenize the project sometime soon.

Is that something you would appreciate help with? If so, I'd be happy to create a fork and give it a go.

Whatever the case, thanks for the cool plugin.

Cheers,
Paul Thompson
aka captbunzo

Hello there Paul,

Because Signshop depends on quite a few other plugins which are not "Maven connected", it is very hard to move Signshop over to a Maven project.
I did try this at some point but I ended up with a dirty Maven config file. Which just had a load of "hardcoded" JAR references. This, according to the Maven documentation, is bad practise. So we decided to give up on Maven support.
However, I am not an expert when it comes to Maven. And if you have any suggestions as to how Signshop can be a Maven enabled plugin without losing all the links to the plugins. Then I'd be happy to hear them.

Either way, thank you for taking the time to write up an issue.

With kind regards,
Wargamer

Hi Wargamer,

Thanks for the reply and apologies for the slow response on my part.

I must confess I am not a Maven expert. However, I have been playing about with Maven for a few months with my own plugins. I also have ran into this problem. Personally, I have worked around it by creating my own Maven repository (http://repo.pjt.me) and adding jars for un-Mavenized projects into the "3rd Party" repository that comes setup by default with Sonatype Nexus.

I think it is worth exploring whether there is any problem with including other people's jars in such a Maven repository. I would suspect that most jars we'd link against would either be open source or at least licensed such as to allow linking with other plugins.

If we can determine that it's acceptable to do this, then I might suggest.

1. Use a custom Maven repository for this. I am happy to offer mine.
2. Use a public Maven repository for this. It might be better to see if there is a nice common Bukkit related Maven repo we could submit "3rd Party" plugins to.

For now for using your plugin, I have included SignShop.jar in my repository. Is this ok with you? If you are interested in pursuing any of the above, let me know and I am happy to help.

One last thought might be to do exactly as I am doing with you and see if other plugins developers are interested in becoming Mavenized. IMHO, it's a no-brainer for linkable / hookable / apied plugins, if at all possible. :)

Cheers,
Paul Thompson
aka captbunzo

Hello Paul,

First of all, I'd really like to thank you for shedding some light on the magic called Maven. I will consider hosting the 3rd party libs on a Maven repo (for as far as licensing allows me to).

I'm OK with Signshop being hosted on Maven, whether it's yours or any other. It's open source for a reason. As long as it's labeled like it should be, 3rd party.

Do let me know if you need any help with hooking into Signshop.

With kind regards,
Wargamer