A Site for Civi Modules and Extensions

[colemanw]

This also relates to the discussion at http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,22908.msg96556.html

I believe that having a good, active repository for plug-ins is a vital key to CiviCRM's future. That's certainly true for other software: what would Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, JQuery, etc. etc. be without plug-ins?

In this discussion I'd like to identify some problems and solutions. I also recognize that I'm fairly new to this community (and to software development in general) and want to hear some wisdom from others.

Problem 1: Extensions and modules for CiviCRM are all over the web. Many are available on drupal.org or github, others are just floating around on people's personal websites.

Problem 2: It's easier to write a Drupal module to extend CiviCRM than to write a standalone (CMS independent) CiviCRM extension. So that's what people are doing. See the other thread for more discussion of this.

Problem 3: More and more modules are being bundled with CiviCRM not because everyone needs them, but because there's no other place for them (ex: CiviCRM OG Sync, CiviEngage). The same goes for CiviCRM components, i.e. CiviGrant and CiviCase, which probably should not be bundled with core, but again, there's no other place to put them right now.

Idea 1: Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were a way to browse, download, and install extensions from within CiviCRM? (like Wordpress and Drupal 7).

Idea 2: The site http://directory.civicrm.org is a great step in the right direction, and gives us a nice starting point for this project. What could we do to make it meet the needs of...
- Version control
- Community maintained
- Issue tracking
- Release packaging
- Perhaps auto-sync (rdf?) to drupal.org projects, etc.

[xavier]

Hi,

100% agree we need some kind of directory. I like the component approach, but wondering if we can pull it. ie. I'd rather have a system that benefit from drupal/wp/J! existing modules plugins infrastructure than re-inventing the wheel, and having it not as rounded as the existing solutions.

For the foreseeable future, we will have still drupal & wp & J! modules. IMO it doesn't make sense to provide a complete hosting/issue tracking and so on infrastructure, I'd rather leverage the existing ones that are already used by the community (drupal, github...) and provide pointers. Something that could be super useful is some kind of data about the staleness of each of these modules, and "value" (eg. like drupal counting how many times it's used, or simply a manual feedback).

As for the 100% civi extensions, they should be promoted better, and we should do some promotion work on what they can (payment, search...), or can't do.

I know that jQuery is working on a new & better plugin directory and their ideas are good IMO:
https://github.com/jquery/plugins.jquery.com

Would be good to see what we can re-use or work together on that.

Oh, and before we forget: we have to register on civicrm.org/civicrm the developers working on a plugin (eg. to send info about new hooks/apis)

And last but not the least, we need to put in place a team to maintain/moderate this directory. Happy to give a hand.

[xavier]

1) request a standard "description" file that provides at least (their package json)
- name
- category (D6, D7,J!, WP, civi extensions). Can it be multiple?
- url
- civicrm version(s)
-...

ie. kind of a xxx.info, but with more about how it works with civi

2) a ping-back solution
So you can put in place in your external repository a system to automatically update our civicrm directory (eg. date of latest update, to deal with the staleness)

Their existing code seems to rely on WP & node. I haven't tried it, but seems interesting

[Donald Lobo]

So who's going to lead the project? Would be great to get it done before CiviCon SF 2012

We can start off small and increase scope/feature set over a period of time. Two big things to start off with:

1. Build a community maintainable / review-able directory (i.e. extend and improve directory.civicrm.org)

2. Ensure 4.2 can support independent extensions and port a few modules that illustrate this (CiviEngage? Event Discount etc)
* Add more reports and custom searches to this also. Seems like we have quite a few in the wild now

lobo