Hi devs, We have a lot of entries on extensions.xwiki.org (869 as of today) and this causes some problems for our users:
P1) A lot of them are not of good quality (they don’t work with the latest versions, they are complex to use, they’ve not been updated for a long time and are doing old and deprecated ways of doing things such as not providing an entry in the Applications Panel for example, they’re not just polished, etc) and this causes frustrations for our users. Note that this also reflects on the overall quality of the XWiki project and product. P2) It’s hard for users to locate good extensions among the rest. We’ve started addressing P1) by introducing ratings on e.x.o. This is not fully successful so far because we don’t have enough people voting and because those ratings are not used to display/filter extensions on the Extensions LT or inside XWiki in the EM UI. So we need to continue this effort. Note that this proposal is not addressing non-extensions such as snippets which we’ll need to move elsewhere at some point but that becomes less important with the proposal below. Proposal ======= I’d like to propose an additional strategy that, IMO, is better suited for the size of our community: curation. Curation is the process of hand-selecting the best extensions and marking them as recommended. The idea would be to list recommended extensions first on the e.x.o home page, in the EM UI in XWiki and even in extension search results. In the EM UI, an idea would also be to have a new “Recommended Extensions” filter in addition to the existing filters (core extensions, installed extensions, etc) and that would be the default filter on the “Add Extensions” UI. I propose to add a “Recommended” xproperty in the Repository app for that. We can decide whether we want this just for e.x.o or committed in the Repository app in xwiki-platform. Then we need to decide about the curation process: * The XWiki core committers are in charge (i.e. have the responsibility) of monitoring the apps that are marked “Recommended”, ie. validating that it’s done correctly. XWiki core committers have the authorization to unset an app that was marked a recommended by a community member. * We wouldn’t offer a simple way in the UI to mark an extension as recommended since we don’t want everyone who has an account on xwiki.org to start marking apps as recommended. OTOH we want to allow people from the xwiki community to help out. So the way to mark an extension as recommended would be to use the object editor (for now, we can define a better implementation mechanism later on). * We define some basic rules that extensions need to follow at minimum to be accepted as recommended. These will be our guidelines to avoid conflict of opinions (although there’s always the possibility in which case it’s resolved through a vote): - Need to work on LTS + latest XWiki version (ie. ATM that would be 7.4.x and 8.1) - Need to present a polished aspect and be easily usable - Need to follow most of the best practices defined on http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/ApplicationDevelopmentBestPractices. Some important examples: technical pages are hidden, extension is registered in the app bar when it makes sense, extension is internationalized (if it makes sense), pages are in xwiki syntax 2.0+. WDYT? I’m willing to help do the work and mark extensions as recommended. Thanks -Vincent _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
