Third Party Add-on Policies for the New Forums
Today we are introducing two new changes to our Community Forums to help people find new add-ons and to ensure that people have a better support experience with third party add-ons.
First, we are changing the “Site Introduction” forum to the Community News forum. In this forum you can announce your new ExpressionEngine powered site, add-on, or other related product or service. Additionally we have a program in development that will enable developers to reach the Community through the ExpressionEngine Blog. We will provide details at a later date once we take this service live.
Second, starting today we are no longer allowing third party developers to host or provide technical support for third party add-ons directly on the ExpressionEngine Forums. We encourage you to tell people about your add-on on the Community News Forum, and answer questions people may have about its purpose, but you must provide your own hosting and support for your add-on. We are confident that this is a win for you and the community.
With our site refresh we looked closely at all forum activity, and for the developer forums, we saw a need to go back to the drawing board. From the beginning, the goal of the development forums was to allow developers to ask questions that would then be answered either by EllisLab developers or fellow third party developers. Because we split the forums up by add-on type and due to a lack of good alternatives, these desirable programming conversations got buried in add-on announcements and user support.
Simplification was in order to provide a space that could focus on the technically minded discussions of Development and Programming, as they pertain to ExpressionEngine. Now there’s a clear home for questions on creating add-ons, how to use a particular library, or even about using PHP in a template. Instead of user conversations about add-on Y’s tag parameter X, this forum will clearly help developers learn how to extend ExpressionEngine along side their peers: other coding professionals.
Visibility of your add-ons will not be a concern. Three years ago, users got their information on what add-ons were available from our site. That’s no longer the case, with the wonderful resource at Devot:ee. Ryan Masuga sums up why he created this site on Devot:ee’s about page:
We wouldn’t necessarily go to Apple’s site for all the tips, tricks and help for our Apple products – why would we do that for EllisLab products? EllisLab’s forums are great (the best, most useful forums we’ve ever been a part of) – but we had some great ideas to take EE-related information even further – and so devot:ee was created.
And that’s precisely what he did. Devot:ee not only put the third party add-on information stream squarely back into the hands of third parties, he did it in a way that greatly surpasses anything we tried here at ExpressionEngine.com.
The options for hosting and supporting your add-ons are near limitless. Commercial add-on developers will quickly find that they are much more successful when they have a dedicated site and their own support center. For authors who just want to freely share their work, using a site like BitBucket will give you hosting, versioning, past downloads, issue tracking, a wiki, and so on. Get Satisfaction is another option for customer service and support with options ranging from free and simple to robust solutions suitable for enterprise level support. In all cases, the experience for both you and your users is far superior compared to using a forum thread.
For community members, if you haven’t already, you’ll want to start using Devot:ee to keep up with the third party add-on scene. We will continue to foster that relationship to increase and improve how their information ties into our site. Third party developers with any questions are invited to post to the discussion thread linked above for this entry or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) for questions of a private nature. Also, keep an eye out on the ExpressionEngine blog both for information on our press release submission program as well as an upcoming post with some tips on using Mercurial to manage your add-on development.
