"Extra" developers would benefit from a partner, and from a "review board."

no idea what the solid thing means =), would be interesting though!

I dont get the point of having a review process in extras, this would limit the inputs of the community.

Simple metrics should help users to decide if an extra is good

1) How many download of the plugin ?
2) What score on rating system ?
3) When is the last update ?
4) Is the dev active on support ?
5) ..

If all of these are positive, the code looks "alive" and i will be confident in using it. I think also that point 4) is the most important.

Long time ago, when a new extra was posted, a thread in the forum was automatically created. This was a great feature.

and +1 for a rating system in package manager

Quote from: exside at May 29, 2014, 05:47 PM

no idea what the solid thing means =)

Me too.

'Solid' was a mark that those extras were tested and vetted by the MODX team. Most of the "solid" extras were, in fact, built by the MODX team of the day. We've not really had an opportunity to make any changes to the Extras in the recent years. It's a huge application integrated with a variety of systems and until we decouple them, we likely won't make any small changes. We're more likely to make improvements to the PM UI first for Revo and then add them to the Extras list at modx.com/extras.

I used to be miffed that none of my extras except Captcha were marked as solid, no matter how solid they have become, but I've adjusted.

BobRay,

We had envisioned a process (back in 2010) where Extras authors could submit their Extras for review by the MODX team. But it never panned out. In all honesty, the best situation would be to lose the Solid and move to a rating system as seen in marketplaces. We have a planned solution for the extras handling similar to what everyone has said including the ability for abandoned Extras to be adopted.

That sounds great to me.

Thanks for the follow-up remarks, Jay. I know that "Extras" may be inadvertently thought of as "non-essential", because the core of MODX provides the platform to build websites/web applications. But it's good to remember Extras as essential, optional components for the websites that need (or are greatly enhanced by) them.

Everything done to strengthen the Extras system strengthens MODX.

Dennis

dennisleahy,

In no way do I, or any of the MODX team, consider Extras as non-essential. Extras are critical. MODX is intended to be shipped pretty much empty and then Extras added to give all non-core functionality and therefore, we understand how critical it is.

It is why, when Extras goes down, no matter what time of day, I and other team members at MODX work to get it back up and running. Fortunately, it's been pretty rock solid the last few months since @opengeek made some critical changes. We've spent the last 6 months behind the scenes working to replace some very old code on very fragile, very expensive infrastructure.

We know we need be ever-improving Extras, and we'll be able to confidently do so once we've resolved the key infrastructure and architecture issues, otherwise we're fixing the car on the highway. We have limited people and time to do everything we need to do and we have to make choices based on value, impact and importance. We'll make the Extras better as soon as it's possible.

Hi,
Good to hear you guys take Extras (or Addons or Apps. which is it?) as critical.
I too find working with Modx becoming frustrating, not because of MODX itself but because of faulty, abandoned or poorly documented extra's.
Same here, MxCalendars is a poorly functioning extra (and quite essential IMO for a CMS) i posted bug reports on the Github page but its been crappy for over a year now and no word from the developer.

But there are more Extra's that give the MODX experience a bad rep (a namespace conflict between Analytics and SEOpro for one). So i vote for adding comments to the Extra pages so user can share solutions, examples and knowledge (like ; it seems this addon has been abandoned ) to help out.
Many more people shall encounter 'Extra' problems and loss of time had simply because there is no mentioning of it anywhere before it is installed. 1 comment on the Extra page would have prevented a lot of aggravation. Aggravation that reflects poorly on the MODX brand.

So ad Quip the the extra's pages

RDG