Yes, that would be the only thing add-on devs need to take care of to make this feature working. Then all add-ons will become "supported add-on" as long as they get posted on the add-ons page. The only thing missing is how to handle add-ons included in the MB installer. This part will need add-on devs' (or Steven's) help. The meta files for those add-ons will need to be included in the installer to notify users what add-ons need to get updated even after fresh installation if they have installed the updater plugin. How about using a single fixed location for storing all meta files? Maybe it could use something like "MusicBee\Plugins\Meta" for all meta files for every kind of add-ons including the ones included in the installer. Then the updater plugin could also help to download and update the meta file when the user updates an add-on using the plugin.
plugin must search for multiple metadata files for the same add-on, compare their last changed date and choose the latest metafile, if metadata files may be placed in any subfolder of 'musicbee' folder. i mean that there may be situation when .meta files are duplicated (i.e version info is different, but all other meta-tags are the same). i would generate .meta files for all available add-ons, include them into update notifier package and install them to 'musicbee\meta' or 'musicbee\plugins\meta' folder on update notifier installation.
I am thinking of storing all the .meta file in a single folder. Right now MusicBee stores plugins and skins on 2 different locations. You can manually place the plugins in
C:\Program Files (x86)\MusicBee\Plugins
But if you use the new "add plugin" option from the plugin dialogue, it gets stored in this directory:
C:\Users\AvikB\AppData\Roaming\MusicBee\Plugins\
Since the AppData directory does not require any admin privilage, it is also used by the Windows Store version. Right now the addon updater looks for plugins in both location.
I am planning to use this location to store the .meta files for all addons:
C:\Users\AvikB\AppData\Roaming\MusicBee\Meta
Since the addon updater also looks for unsupported addons, it does this by looking for "mb_*.dll" and "xml/xmlc" file. and checks if the same file name but with .meta extension is available or not. I don't know if there is another way to do it or not. But this ensures that the meta file
MUST have the same name as the addon. Only difference should be the extension. So for example if an addon is named "mb_TaskbarTidbit.dll", the meta file name must be "mb_TaskbarTidbit.meta".
Also right now if you use "add plugin" option from musicbee and select a zip file that has a plugin and a meta file, it stores everything in a flat directory. Steven needs to add some functionality to store the meta file in a separate directory like the one i said above.
@boroda74 i am not going to use the last udpdated date for compare, but i am planning to use the addon version for this. This gives the devs more control. The last updated date is not controllable, and not suitable for this sort of purpose.
As for duplicated meta file, if you use MusicBee's inbuilt "add plugin" option, it should be dealt by MusicBee. MusicBee should aslo replace the meta file with the new meta file in the zip
One thing i don't like about MusicBee is the plugin folder structure. Right now i am working on a Web UI for MusicBee and it has several .dll files and it all clutters the plugin directory. Maybe Steven can move them to a subfolder when using the "add plugin" option.