Any jQuery Plugin Update Manager Utility?

Question

We use jQuery very heavily on a couple of projects and along with it we have loads (sometimes close to a dozen) plugins we use (jqGrid, jPolite, jGrowl, colorbox, layout, validate, formatters, mask, to name a few).

My fear is at some point managing which of these have updates that should be updated is going to become a challange. Anyone know of a tool (or perhaps another 'plugin') that will check all found plugins and report if they are the latest version ? A helper if you will that assists in keeping your jQuery plugins updated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I don't know of anything exactly like what you are looking for, but I do have some ideas for now. Several of the plugins you use have RSS feeds, you could watch those. Others you could write a cron job or two to update the projects from the source.

Answer 2

So you want something like perl's CPAN, or Ruby Gems, but strictly for jQuery?

There is not such a thing to my knowledge, although it would be extremely cool and useful.

Since the plugin DB already basically exists (although I doubt how current it all is), How hard would it be to write a wrapper around it?

If you want to start a project, lemme know, we'd have to get the JQ.org folks in on it though.

Answer 3

Instead of adding in one more tool, I suggest you do this with one you are already using: The version control system. Most decent version control software supports external includes which you can use to keep your plugins up to date.

Say we want to include the latest mousewheel plugin in our SVN project, in your plugins folder do:

svn propset svn:externals "mwheel http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/svn/tags/plugins/mousewheel/3.0/" .
svn commit
svn update

This will create a folder called mwheel and keep it updated with whatever is in the remote repository whenever you update locally.