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extend our code bend our app
growing up so fast

I wanted to take a moment today to acknowledge all of the hard working third party developers in our community, as well as draw attention to the growth spurt that we’ve seen in that area.  In the last 18 months, perhaps two years, a major shift began taking place in the third party developer community.  It used to be that extending ExpressionEngine was largely about creating one-off add-ons for a specific site or user.  There were exceptional standouts of course, like our good friends at Solspace, who for a long time had both free and commercial plugins and modules targeting a broad audience.

At that time, we were thrilled and proud to see that there were web firms who had started and built successful businesses around ExpressionEngine, using it almost exclusively for their clients who needed content management.  We’re now starting to see the same thing take place in the third party developer community, striking out portions of their business based on building tools that extend or work with ExpressionEngine.

continue reading…

So am I reading correctly that Dec 1st is the launch date or was that a “once we set a release date”?

I’m pumped!

So am I reading correctly that Dec 1st is the launch date or was that a “once we set a release date”?

I’m pumped!

Hi Seth,

sounds like you have a little reading to catch up on. 😊

Thanks for the shoutout, Derek!

I’ve been getting to know EE2 &/ CI since getting back from EECI, and really appreciate the magnitude/awesomeness of this transition.

I am more impressed at Brandon quitting his day job to get his extensions going full time. I mean they are great and i use them, like i expect many others are - so again congrants to brandon.
Off topic request though - WYGWAM - could you add a FF file field than pops up the CKFinder facility as part of CKeditor in wygwam? Ngen File is great though, and still use it, but having and paying for WYGWAM this would be another nice bonus for client consistency!

Congrats all round…

Curious to know why EllisLab wants to continue to support the addon library when Devot:ee has stepped in and taken on the massive task?

Kenny I don’t see how that precludes ExpressionEngine.com having an add-on library.  The goals for each are not identical and the community is certainly not hurt by the information existing on the official site and a fan site.  It would be irresponsible on our part to assume that a third party will fill that role for the ExpressionEngine market in perpetuity.  If someone published their own documentation for ExpressionEngine, would that mean we should stop publishing ours?

BA-DOOM!

I’m ok with EllisLab having a list of updated addons, but the addon library at EE.com has been poorly mismanaged. So why not jettison it to the community and focus on other parts of EE?

I’m ok with EllisLab having a list of updated addons, but the addon library at EE.com has been poorly mismanaged. So why not jettison it to the community and focus on other parts of EE?

This is where we disagree. It hasn’t been poorly mismanaged in our view. Could it be better? Certainly, but it’s definitely doing its job which is supplying a list of add-ons that have at least some vetting of the code and compatibility directly from EllisLab. They aren’t certified by any means but each has been reviewed for basic issues directly by our dev team.

Again, it makes sense to have both as each have different goals. Our keeping it certainly hasn’t prevented Devotee from being awesome and I don’t see how removing it would help anybody.

If you’re a person exploring ExpressionEngine for the first time, and one of the features is extendability, wouldn’t you expect to find some examples of this on the product’s site and not a link elsewhere?  That might fly in the open source world, but our end users expect more.  But I think the more critical question is: who vets the code in the add-ons featured at Devotee, or any other third party repository?

I’m ok with EllisLab having a list of updated addons, but the addon library at EE.com has been poorly mismanaged. So why not jettison it to the community and focus on other parts of EE?

Is it perfect?  No.  Poorly mismanaged?  I think that’s a rather extreme opinion.

We’ve stated numerous times publicly that this section of the site will receive improvement after 2.0’s launch.  The thrust of this blog post is about third party development and their relationship both with ExpressionEngine and EllisLab.  The submission program will be reopened, and we have big plans for the add-on certification program as well.  The latter is something that cannot be handled by a third party entity, no matter how qualified.

Guys, there has been one addon added this year. One. At a time when EE’s developers have really started kicking into high gear. Brandon Kelly, who is named in this post, isn’t even in there. Poorly mismanaged was only wrong in that it hasn’t been managed at all. You closed the submissions. I don’t think it’s extreme if evidence supports it.

In a smaller community, I can see having the official site carry addons as helpful. But since EE is now on it’s awesome rocket ship, I think there’s too much danger and murky water there: especially since Ryan Masuga has done an excellent job of keeping Devot:ee up-to-date and unbiased.

Certified addons are a different story, but being certified allowed for sale in the EllisLab store (which makes sense). So I’m not including those in my arguments.

Thanks for the feedback, Kenny, and I appreciate the disappointment in the submission being closed for so long.  But I’m afraid our opinions on this are not going to converge.  Devot:ee is a fantastic site, and Ryan Masuga has done a great job getting behind it and sticking with it, but not being under the wings of EllisLab, we have no control or assurance that such a project will always exist and maintain the needs.

What if Ryan decided tomorrow that he liked CMS X instead of EE, or could no longer afford to run it, or just got bored of it, and took the site down?  Or if his host asploded the site and lost all of the backups?  Then no such resource would exist, well-maintained or not.

I’m sorry Kenny, you’re really not making sense to me. How is closing it or removing it helpful to anybody? Dangerous? You’re acting like Devotee and the official add-on library are mutually exclusive, as if its one or the other. We heavily promoted Devot:ee and helped launch it. We believe in what Ryan is doing and throw traffic is way regularly both on the EE Blog and in sales emails, on the these forums, through tech support, etc….

The same goes for Brandon. We’ve helped promote his work regularly through all of our official channels.

Your position seems to be that these two resources are in competition, addressing the same need with the same goals. They are not. You’re also assuming that the official library gets no use, which isn’t true either. It gets a lot of use, every day.

Devotee fills a need that EllisLab can’t and shouldn’t. It should be a 3rd party site that remains unbiased. There is a need for that. There is also a need for a first party library where the code has received some official vetting. And closing submissions is managing it. Since we vet the code we had to close it since we don’t have the time to do that now. As DJ said, it will reopen post 2.0’s release.

My point is not about exclusivity. My point is about what value it brings.

However, Its been shut down for a year, so who is to say that you won’t shut down submissions again in 2 years when you’re working on 3.0?

It currently may be used, but its been poorly executed. If you guys are going to make it a valuable, frequently updated resource, then that is awesome. The track record is different. I think promising that submissions won’t be closed when you’re busy and that it will be updated frequently will go a long way towards changing my opinion of the idea. Otherwise, I think that resources spent on it would be more useful elsewhere in propelling the community forward.