Snippets mods : shouldn't those be integrated into the original snippet ?

I already have raised the issue on #modx on IRC lately...

I am starting to worry about those snippets "mods" that recently started flourishing on the board : DropMenu, FlexSearchForm ,NewsListing and many more have been modified one or more times. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against those improvements, on the contrary !

But having several "branch" of a snippet will undoubtedly become less and less efficient as time goes by, because we might end up with 5, 6 or even more versions of a given snippet, because the person who modded it might not update it in the future (same goes for support) and also because this modded version might not be upgraded when the main branch is.

Now, I think we should define some kind of criterias to define which should possibly be integrated into the main branch and which should not (not every modification to a snippet should be). For me those who should be integrated into the main branch are :

• those whose features meet the widest audience’s needs
• those who are "cleanly coded" (no serious bug, use of API rather than other methods) and documented
• those who don’t cause a significant drop in performance

Here are a few items I have been thinking about, but it’s not really "my part" so I expect corrections and additions to be made...

This of course raises the issue of having people who write mods cooperate with the original snippet developper. We could have a sticky in the Modules, plugins and Snippet forum that would give some advice and direction regarding snippets improvement and how to make the community best benefit from them...

What do you think ?

I’m in complete agreement David, and why I request mods filed as feature requests on the bugtracker.

DropMenu is due a major overhaul and cleanup.

FlexSearch is due a nice degradable livesearch to go in theme with our Ajaxian goodness.

PageTrail should be supplanted by Breadcrumbs.

Etc.

Can’t we have some kind of SVN for snippets and etc? I mean, we can start recruiting all the major second tier users into the team and start maintaining this so called snippets/plugins. We can setup the right limited SVN account for them to only maintain their own snippets/projects, while the main 2nd tier users will have access to all this snippets/plugins, so in case if the current developer of the snippets decided not to continute developing the snippets, we as the 2nd tier core user able to pick up the project and continue with the development.

What do you guys think?

Giving away SVN commit access is definitely something to not be taken lightly. There should be a dedicated team member to do a sanity check on all commits, but I like the idea and direction you’re headed!

(Hoping for SF to release SVN support soon!)

Did you host our current development SVN on your dedicated server Ryan?
I’ll see what I can do. Planning to donate a SVN server if I have the budget for this year.

PS: I need to learn SVN as well, lol

SVN is hosted at CVSdudes.com

SVN could be a very nice idea, but indeed you’d either have to check commits (adding an additionnal burden for the dev team...) or you could only check commits of new people and when you know they’re serious and thorough, let them do it on their own...

About snippets, for instance I think the mindspill version of DropMenu is a huge enhancement (didn’t test it yet, don’t know about bugs and server load)...

I guess what Ryan said about having more people dedicated to bug testing would not only apply to MODx but snippet/module/plugins bug testing could become quite something. Plus, it’s often a weak point of opensourcecms : add ons are often way more buggy than the app itself.

We could score points here...

Another one that I think could be better integrated in DropMenu (or at least the question should be asked).

Thanks to Zi for attracting attention about this one...

I know we have many things cooking but this question of wether or not snippets modification/enhancements should be integrated based on a few criterias (to be discussed) will become more and more critical if we want to make sure we don’t have scattered code for one particular feature...

It’s going to become hard to track all mods/enhancements down with the growing number of contributors...

Especially without a proper resource repository...

Quote from: rthrash at Mar 01, 2006, 08:50 AM

Especially without a proper resource repository...

So what’s the plan?
I can create a new SVN, but we might need to think of a better solution to organize this groups of 2nd tier users.
We can’t wait too long for the repository for MODx to be done. At least we need to have something up and running and it can be access to ensure versioning of the resources.

I think we need to discuss this further in this topic.