Show an tip when plugin's preferences pane have error

northword · February 22, 2024

Show an informational message when there is an error in the plugin's preferences pane, instead of keeping the content as it was before the switch.

Typically, this could be a missing Fluent message or an XML structure error. We should give a generic message such as "There is an error in the Preferences pane of this plugin, please contact the plugin developer to resolve it".

Otherwise users are confused, "Why can't I open the preferences for this plugin?" , or even a user who switches from a normal plugin to an abnormal plugin and realizes that the preferences pane hasn't changed, but instead thinks that the normal plugin is breaking the abnormal plugin's preferences pane.

northword · March 5, 2024

It may be resolved by commit [https://github.com/zotero/zotero/commit/ba86e9b4c92aea8818e50d96b04f905721f66162
], but there seems to be no prompt on the UI.

dstillman · March 5, 2024

Plugins can break in all sorts of ways, though, most of which we can't detect. While there wouldn't be any harm in an error here if we could detect one, people kind of have to understand that for any problem with a plugin they need to contact the plugin developer.