Create a page with Community Plugins

[arjo129]

Currently, high-quality plugins developed by the community (e.g., specialized sensors, specific actuator controllers, or visual effects) are scattered across individual GitHub repositories. New users often struggle to find these resources, leading to "reinventing the wheel" or missing out on powerful tools that aren't part of the core gz-sim library.

I would like to see a dedicated "Community Plugins" page—either within the official documentation (gazebosim.org) or as a curated list in the repository—to showcase these contributions.

Alternatives considered

Searching GitHub/Bitbucket: Users currently rely on manual searches or "Awesome Gazebo" lists, which can become outdated or hard to find.

Third-party Wikis: Community-run wikis exist but often lack the authority and visibility of the official Gazebo documentation.

Implementation suggestion

Documentation Integration: Add a "Community Plugins" section to the Gazebo Sim Documentation.

Categorization: Organize plugins by type (e.g., Sensors, Physics/System, GUI, Rendering).

Submission Process: Use a simple YAML-based registry or a specific "community-plugin" GitHub label that triggers an automated update to the list, or simply a curated Markdown file in a community folder.

Metadata: Each entry should include:

Plugin Name

Supported Gazebo versions (e.g., Harmonic, Ionic)

Brief description

Link to the repository

[peci1]

As there are (currently blurry) thoughts about building community plugins on buildfarm in some distant future, wouldn't it make more sense to have this list formatted close to how rosindex is built? I know that currently there would be no release repos, but at least a source and doc entry could be added.

[peci1]

And then a script can generate a docs page with the list (until it is too long :) ). And I agree that having some categories for the plugins would be good, that would be an extra compared to rosindex.

[peci1]

And it would be super-great if the entries contained information about compatible Gazebo versions. The way it is currently done in rosindex is to have a YAML for each distro. Maybe a similar thing could be done for Gazebo?

When branching-off a new release, this distro file could be copied and the status of all plugins would be set to untested. People could then submit reports about tested plugins.

[arjo129]

I think thats an absolutely valid approach. Personally, if a plugin is mature enough that is being built in the ros buildfarm, I think we should provide rosindex links.

[azeey]

It doesn't have the the structure you proposed, but there's already https://gazebosim.org/docs/jetty/projects_using_gazebo/. Maybe that could be extended?