I wrote SublimeLinter 3 (for SublimeText) and put a lot of effort into making it easy for plugin developers to write and publish plugins. As a result there are now over 100 plugins for SublimeLinter. If you really want to encourage plugins, I have a few suggestions based on my experience:
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Create a
yeomantemplate that asks a few questions that will fill in things like the class name, description, command, homonyms, etc., and then generates a stub plugin complete with stub documentation. -
Decide if you are going to have an “official” set of curated plugins. If so, then create a @lipsurf npm org and publish them under that org. That guarantees that users will know which ones are official.
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Encourage an npm package naming convention for plugins. For example, “lipsurf-foo-bar”. Also, they should be sure to use the “lipsurf-plugin” keyword in the package. That can (and should) be done in the
package.jsonfile that is part of theyeomantemplate. -
If it’s possible, allow plugins to be loaded from a well-known place on disk. That allows the user to simply download a plugin, put it into a folder, and restart Chrome.