I could manually maintain a mapping file that maps add-on id to plugin name/ skin name
MB would load the mapping file from the getmusicbee.com website
Its not ideal but i dont think its too much of a burden to do
However if you are proposing a live query to support this, i dont think its a good idea as there will be a huge number of hits as MB would run the query every time MB is started. The add-ons page is already quite slow to load some times.
I always had in mind you would be appending to a text file each time a add-on is updated and that MB would load the file, so if thats not the case it might be better to go back to your original idea.
actually doing a query is fast, since it only contains the json formatted data:
the addon page on the other hand takes some time. It is mostly due to image loading. I will do something about it in future.
I am not planning to append to a text file. I think the ideal solution is to have a .xml manifest file that would contain all the info needed for the update.
The updater will scan for the manifest files and get the update data only for the addons that are installed.
I don't think manually maintain a list is proper way to do it.