The State of EE Add-on Distribution

Ryan Masuga has posted an excellent article over at devot:ee about the state of how EE add-ons are released, announced, tracked (or not), maintained and improved. Ryan walks through the current methods of distributing your EE add-ons.

The forum posting method is the most widely used, yet, in my opinion, the most ineffective. Ryan agrees:

Many times, the developer won’t overwrite the file in the 1st thread post with a new version, but will attach updated files to a later post, that may be buried 7 pages down the line, forcing users to wade through any number of off-topic comments, support requests, and other detritus.

[...]

There’s no guideline for titling the thread, or the file(s), either. My suggestion has always been to prefix the thread title with the type of add-on you’re posting, such as “Extension: MD Dulee Noted”, or “Plugin: Weegee”, but not everyone follows that.

There’s also the Official EE Add-On Library. I, like Ryan, tend to look there last when searching for an EE add-on. It’s rarely updated and most of the developers I tend to download from don’t have their add-ons listed.

And then there’s Github. A group of us have been using Github as a way to track and share add-ons and other EE code. The community isn’t for everyone (it’s developer-focused), but having a central repository is a great thing. There is a free Github account and you can host as many public projects as you’d like.

It’s a good time for Ryan to begin this conversation. As the EE user base grows ,there’s no better time than now to fix this scattering of EE add-ons. The problem will only get worse with EE 2.0. We will see more people developing add-ons because suddenly we’ll have joined the CodeIgniter developers community.

Now is the time to get organized as a community. This isn’t something that has to be lead by EllisLab. Let’s let them focus on building great software. The community can more than handle this task.

I, for one, am very supportive of Ryan’s undertaking and hope he can use devot:ee as a tool to organize this beautiful mess of add-ons. Give the whole article a read and post any feedback.