Hi all,
I’d like to ask if there’s a specific search or “recipe” to detect which plugins are currently unused in a wiki.
My current workflow is to disable them for a while before finally deleting them. Is this the recommended approach, or is there a more efficient way to audit them?
Thanks in advance!
I think your approach is the only one available at the moment.
-m
If you’d like to take a more active, methodical approach, most plugins include some documentation explaining the new features they add… and all plugins have, at minimum, a “contents” tab, where you can open each shadow tiddler and inspect the code yourself. So you could make a list of any major components added by a plugin (paying special attention to any new widgets/macros/procedures) and then use Advanced Search to see where these features are used in your wiki. If you can’t find any instances in your standard tiddlers or in system tiddlers you’ve created yourself, it’s probably safe to delete the plugin.
Thanks for your response, until now I’m using this sort of search/query for elements, but I’m not an expert on this questions and I’d like to ask for a better method…
I keep learning.
@jose this can be very dependant on the plugin in question as they can be used for a very wide range of solutions. One approach would be to look at the plugin readme, often they provide a macro or widget and you can search your tiddlers for invocation of that macro or widget, if found you can stop searching and keep the plugin, if not found you can dig a little deeper once you understand what functions the plugin delivers.
Disabling plugin, save and reload then using your wiki for a while to see if the lack of the plugin has an impact is another approach, is a few weeks you can delete all disabled plugins, however I recommend doing the above first before relying on this approach.