This issue summarizes the private jquery-devs-list discussion started by@scottgonzalez regarding future direction of the plugins site.

Given the other priorities and limited resources of the Foundation, we haven't been investing in enhancements for the Plugins site over the past year, as evidenced by the open issues in this repo. Even with more resources, it isn't clear whether we should invest them here when there are other solutions such as Bower and npm that span the entire scope of dependencies, not just jQuery.

At this point if we were to point developers elsewhere, it seems the only two viable solutions are Bower and npm. The core team recentlydropped Bower for npm in managing its own internal dependencies, and I think most of us would prefer to see npm improve so that it can be a good tool for client-side developers. Here are a few of the things mentioned in the thread that need to be addressed via code, documentation, improved practices, etc:

• Component users don’t like installing a full source tree and component authors don’t like keeping the ignore list up to date.
• Poor control over where components get installed
  • Deep npm deps cause errors on Windows; already a problem with lodash
• Reliant on the registry as a single point of failure
• Difficult to run different release channels (stable, testing, dev, canary)
• No namespacing of packages
• Having taken a ‘not opinionated’ stance, it is now difficult to enforce best practices that would help people automate things.
• Duplicate dependencies are acceptable on server, but a big problem on clients

Most points courtesy of@addyosmani