Sponge simply uses FML’s mod loading system, there’s no requirement to put everything in mods, honestly the easiest thing for you would probably be to put mods in mods and plugins in the maven-style mod repo, that would keep everything nice and separate and also give you nice versioning for your plugins.
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Info on the maven-style args, for reference: New JSON Modlist format · MinecraftForge/FML Wiki · GitHub
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Totally unrelated but your list of plugins/mods shows how terrible bukkit plugin devs were at versioning their plugins. Like barely any plugins have a version whereas almost all mods have a version. Take note sponge plugin developers…
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Any good server admin leading a team, with other fledgling staff supporting their work, should know that “basic” file move/copy/delete scripting without sanity checks, error handling, and logging of results (y’know sort of like a “real program”) are like little time bombs just waiting to go off, should you or one of the other staff accidentally with those “simple” scripts, in a manner that in hindsight was a minor mistake and apparently should not have led to the disaster you now find yourself trying to recover from.
Like using unintentional spaces in linux shell command strings and script parameters. Those are a hoot for the way they can blow things up without any prior warning or recovery, because linux doesn’t ask “are you sure” by default. Eh, they’ll learn eventually, I guess.
In my opinion, Sponge should support the plugins directory as an alternative to the mods directory.
I know that I would personally like this.
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Nobody said scripting languages can’t handle Error checking and logging. It isn’t that hard. I personally didn’t take on any staff that didn’t have a basic understanding of linux and bash or sh. I never had any scripting issues and we were running cauldron which was a nightmare on it’s own.
I’m just saying I think you’re getting too worked up over a minor inconvenience I agree the current setup can be a pain under certain circumstances but you have the means to make it manageable.
And if it really bothers you that bad post a feature request on git and argue your case there.
Why is it necessary to repeat all this case arguing over there? I will create the request with a reference link back to here, and a ref link here over to there. It isn’t as if anyone looking at that git request thing isn’t already over here reading this.
I think this is a bit ridiculous… Sponge just entered Beta… I think it’s better to stay focused on getting Sponge as stable as possible rather than worry about a (as I see it) minor inconvenience.
I realize that convenience is important to the end user, but right now I’d rather see the developers working on stuff that actually brings Sponge closer to becoming a stable replacement for Bukkit.
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Luke,
Since allowing server administrators to specify alternate plugin-jar / config-data paths other than the current defaults is apparently a fairly deep addition to the code, support for it (if it is to be added) needs to be added early in the development rather than bringing it up at the end after release, when the Sponge developers will smile in a polite but knowing manner and say “I’m sorry that is far too significant a change for us to implement at this stage of development. You should have argued this case long ago when the code was more flexible.”
FWIW, Sponge isn’t exactly “early” in development, the project started over a year ago.
Yes, I was going to mention that bit, but didn’t consider it exactly relevant. But since you now raise it Luke in an offhand comment:
,
Why haven’t I said anything about this before now? Because I am not a Java programmer, I am unable to contribute to code writing or plugin API construction, and all the core developers have been shouting at server admins “Stay away! Stay away! We are nowhere near ready for public use of our code! Come back later when things are more stable!”
Well we just crossed the More Stable threshold on January 1st, and so here I am ready to try setting up a full-fledged public server with all the bells and whistles (enjin, votifier, essentials, griefprevention, etc etc) with the beta to see the extent of what is currently possible…
And I now I find out about this smushing together of constantly changing modpack files and infrequently-changing server administration plugin files, for no logical administrative purpose of benefit to a server owner. Ugh.
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The primary people involved here right now are mostly programming experts, so no doubt if I start a feature request on this git thing, I am going to get voted down. The hundreds to thousands of other non-programmer server owner end users that may agree with my arguments, are still only minorly involved on the periphery, waiting for the final release.
Programming experts familiar with the complexities of IDEs and repositories will clearly have no issue writing up pages of shell scripts to work around a semantic argument that they are finally happy to have “won” over the naming of things, so allowing server owners to specify alternate file paths is a trivial issue and must be voted down.
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Since the semantic argument is apparently a deeply held issue amongst programmers, I do need to push this a little further. So you won the word definitions victory, that’s great, high five everyone, you did it!
But why we are even calling them “plugins” anymore on these forums? They are mods. You have said it yourselves. So why is the word “plugin” still being used?
Strike the word “plugins” from these forums and the documentation, because it is the Right Thing To Do. Insert code into the Sponge website forum editor so that when anything is posted, the word “plugin” is substituted for the word “mod”, and it cannot be changed in followup post edits.
It makes no difference if this forced terminology change here also directly in the forums and in the documentation will only sow confusion amongst the global Minecraft server admin end-user collective. It is critical for the programmers to win their definitions argument, above all else.
I honestly don’t have any idea why you saw the need to get so offensive about this, I’m the only staff member who has replied to you here and you utterly ignored my comment. As it happens, we happen to agreee with the underlying point here and are happy to accomodate this functionality.
Because this is (as I already pointed out) not actually forced on you, there are other - better - options that already exist. However if you’d brought it up as a feature request on GitHub then we could have discussed it and likely would have agreed with you (we do).
Pure presumption, and actually kind of unnecessary characterisation of developers as out of touch. Don’t forget, pretty much everyone who came to work on this project came here because we were server admins ourselves, and wanted to ensure a future for minecraft servers in the post-Bukkit era. I reiterate, we discussed this amongst the core staff and all agree that a plugins folder is a good addition.
I don’t see the relevance of scripting to this point, if you count the JSON files I suggested as “scripting” then I urge you to actually read the documentation I linked. It’s far from it! In fact it’s basically a config file, something which server admins are guaranteed to be intimately familiar with.
What? Who is this aimed at. If it’s aimed at me for my suggestion above then I feel that it’s deeply inappropriate. 
We make the distinction thusly:
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mods are things which integrate with the game directly, examples would be tweakers, forge mods, litemods, forge itself, and sponge itself. They “modify” it.
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plugins are things which only interact via an API and thus have no awareness of the underlying platform. They “plug in” to it
Plugins are not mods, however they are loaded in the same way, and thus putting them together made sense from a technical standpoint. Where it falls down - as you pointed out - is from an organisational standpoint.
Huh? No it really can’t, since plugins and mods are different things.
Again who is this aimed at? I see no “programmers” confronting you here. The only sponge developer who replied here was me and I was trying to help. I even brought it up in our staff meeting tonight on your behalf and everyone present agreed with you. Then I come back to post that we decided to add a plugins folder and I come back to see this rant? Honestly, it makes me wonder why we try to help at all.
Regardless of your attitude, we agree with the original point which is that keeping mods and plugins easily separated is a good idea, and basically will be adding an extra option which will default to the folder /mods/plugins but be configurable by the admin, so if you want to put all your plugins in a folder called bigfloppydonkeydick, then that will be entirely up to you 
I would encourage you to make feature requests on GitHub, or in the developer IRC channel #spongedev in future, as staff are more readily accessible via those locations, and you will get faster and more relevant responses.
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I apologize. I am not a programmer, I do not know how things are managed here, and most everyone replying is telling me what a bad idea this is. I will delete my posts.
? Closed and reopened? Leave them? What?
There’s no need to delete your posts, just bear in mind in future that we’re all people, and in general we’re on your side. Stuff which is obvious to someone might not be to someone else and that’s why we welcome community input. If we just said “we know best” every time someone who wanted to use our project had a suggestion then we’d end up with a bunch of useless navel-gazing and no user-base.
Honestly, if people post stupid ideas, we reserve the right to say so. But sensible ideas - such as this - will always be considered.
It was closed by a moderator, we re-opened it because there’s no reason to close it.
The reason why is band wagon-ing.
This issue has been brought up repeatedly in IRC and on the forums, and this is the first time that the staff have agreed to create a separate plugins folder.
So “all the people” responding negatively was people recalling that this argument ended a certain way, and were regurgitating this information in an attempt to be helpful.
Most other times it has been said that it would require extra effort to create a separate folder, for seemingly no real win at the time, or cause changing of forge semantics.
@mumfrey Would this be restricted to plugins, or would this allow for forge mods to also go in the “plugins” folder? The real issue that I see, is that packaged mods from modpacks, and customizations by server admins should be kept separate in order to aid organization, and isn’t necessarily restricted to plugins. A server admin could just as easy add a serverside only forge mod and end up in the same situation when upgrading modpacks.
Functionally, the extra folder is just an extra place searched by FML, I implemented it yesterday so you can see how it works, it’s incredibly simple.
This is the first time I’ve personally seen this. Since we had a staff meeting regarding git last night I just tacked the topic onto the end of the meeting and everyone present agreed. Therefore, it gets added. I mean, I can’t see why it would be shut down because at the end of the day it only adds functionality and doesn’t hurt anyone. I can understand an argument for having plugins instead of mods shut down because let’s face it, the actual name of the folder is utterly irrelevant, and mods is a universal standard. However the argument made above - if somewhat agressively - is perfectly valid and thus not a problem.
Again, I would posit that this might be because previous requests were to use a folder called plugins instead of rather than in addition to mods, but I don’t know.
A key takeaway here maybe ought to be that questions/requests of this nature just need to be redirected to GitHub where they can be discussed by devs and are more easily trackable. I retract the suggestion of using IRC (unless you just want to discuss the possibility of something, rather than request it) because it’s too easy to miss things.
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As I recall, the previous questions were to create a folder called /plugins like on Bukkit, from which all Sponge plugins would be loaded. There would, necessarily, still be a /mods folder on the SpongeForge implementation, but Sponge would not search it for plugins. I believe this hasn’t been suggested since long before Granite became SpongeVanilla, so the issue did not touch upon the Vanilla implementation at all.
Having more ways to compartmentalise the mods & plugins is a good thing.
One concern I do have is that users make sure that the plugins folder doesn’t contain bukkit plugins (which is probably why there was so much debate about Sponge plugins vs doodads etc). For those coming from Cauldron, you pretty much have to start from scratch in the plugins department.
Is plugin data is now going in /config/plugins by default to keep it separated too?
Or is this considered a separate concept, and I should start a new git suggestion for it?
(late edit: typo, I meant “/config/plugins” not “/data/plugins”)