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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.

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I understand the reasoning behind this, but you know what would make it a lot more palatable? Adding membership capabilities and the option to purchase the Forum module to the Freelancer license.  Then I could run ExpressionEngine and have my own support forum.  I don’t understand why the Freelancer version is missing those features. You’re crippling your best customers and advocates.

-Aaron

My first reaction was nostalgia for EE/forums as they ‘used to be’, but this is a great move, timed appropriately with 2.1’s release.

We need you guys (devs and support) to focus on guiding a platform (EE) and a framework (CodeIgniter), which includes ‘grown-up’ collaboration with third-party partners. It’s no surprise to me that you have anticipated that need with respect to the forums/addons.

I only need to ask myself this question ...

“What would it have implied about EllisLabs if, in 2008, I had been given a peek at the forum of 2011-> and found it the same in spirit, subject and context as the one of years past?”

... to know the answer:

“Very bad things 😉 Probably a company/product that had already become irrelevant.”

Thanks for continuing to stretch yourselves and the community at each juncture.

Sounds fair enough to me. I’m all for any changes that make it easier and quicker to get development queries answered. Good call.

I always found the forum a great way to learn about the incredible array of ways EE can be extended. I hope that splintering that info into a multitude of de-centralized sites doesn’t lead to a loss of the community spirit that many developers have shown.

I always found the forum a great way to learn about the incredible array of ways EE can be extended. I hope that splintering that info into a multitude of de-centralized sites doesn’t lead to a loss of the community spirit that many developers have shown.

My feelings exactly. It’s a really nice way to learn about new add-ons by coming to the forums here. Yes admitted not everybody uses the forums to show off their new add-on but most do. Splitting this so that we have to go to Devot-EE.com to learn about new add-ons isn’t the best idea as not every single new add-on added to the site there gets a show (by that I mean that in the forums here you can immediately see new add-ons but on Devot-ee you would have to search for them and you would have to know what exactly what you’re searching for in order to find it).

What Ryan says is correct, we don’t all go to the Apple site to learn about all things Apple but in the same vain why would we go to Devot-ee.com to learn about all things ExpressionEngine then?

Devot-ee.com is a fantastic site and one which caters for a need which was never done here on this site (that’s not a dig in any way at all just an observation) but I don’t feel there is such a community feel with Devot-ee it’s more a search for the add-on type site which is great but then you don’t get all the community input and extra features due to just having found what you want and then using it.

The great thing about the forums is that not only do you have a place where most developers and community helpers go to where they find out this information but also they help out with announcing this information. They learn about it here first, they ask questions about the add-on as do others which a lot of the time spawns new features for the add-on and then the collected people go and tell the world about it either on Twitter, their own sites, other social sites or just on this site to more people in other threads. That will all now be lost in doing this.

I totally respect that this is down to your decision to do this but I personally think that a large amount of exposure for developers will be lost in doing this.

Best wishes,

Mark
x

Splitting this so that we have to go to Devot-EE.com to learn about new add-ons isn’t the best idea ...

Mark, have you read the first part of the announcement? You’re still welcome to post about new add-ons, just provide a link for any follow-up conversations etc. The “serendipity effect”, if you allow me to call it that, still remains.

Hi Ingmar,

Yep I totally saw that we’re allowed to post about what the add-on is etc but that the forum can’t then be used as a support vehicle for the add-on which is what I am referring to. Yes it takes up your forums with posts but they were in totally separate forums which everyone understood they weren’t watched by the moderators but I (personally) think that this worked really well and not allowing people to get support on a forum where you are able to announce the add-on seems a little odd to me. Could of course just be me though?

Best wishes,

Mark

I completely agree with Mark on this point. I’ve created a number of open source add-ons and have enjoyed supporting and developing new features in response to feedback from the EE forums. Now I’m getting PMs from members asking support questions because they can’t post to the original threads. I expect I’ll get an increasing number of these and will end up answering the same questions again and again!

I have a few considerably more complex add-ons I was planning to release; one example is an open source alternative to Solspace’s Favorites module. But now I’m not so sure; is it worth the hassle of setting up a dedicated support site?

This move will surely discourage third party developers who give their time for free to support and expand your platform.

This move will surely discourage third party developers who give their time for free to support and expand your platform.

I couldn’t disagree with you more, Mark.  How much effort does it take to pop your add-on up to BitBucket or GitHub and use that link in your announcement post instead of a file attachment?

Especially if you are making open source add-ons, this will be much more valuable to you and your users.  In fact, it would likely result in decreased net effort since people could fork, send pull requests, add new features, submit bug fixes, etc. on their own.

I expect I’ll get an increasing number of these and will end up answering the same questions again and again!

That would be the case with a forum thread that goes on for pages and pages too.  Users don’t want to slog through dozens of pages to find what they’re looking for.  Again, if you don’t feel that your add-on deserves its own site or page on your site, places like BitBucket will give you a user-editable wiki that can be used for documentation, FAQs, etc.

I’m just not buying the argument that any add-on that is worth implementing on a production site isn’t worth a couple minutes to give it proper home.

While the Devotee references here are contextually relevant, they may have implied a level of indirection that is, after all, purely optional. 

As a user of these forums, how does this change impact me? I must make one extra click after finding the addon in the forum here as usual - by clicking on a support link given within the addon post. This is regrettable (give me the answer to my support issue now! here!), but the benefits outweigh my impatience.

First, Derek’s point matches my experience. It is painful and off-putting to browse/read multiple forum pages of an addon to find (maybe) the relevant item to a usage question. The book-length Structure and Linklocker threads became surreal examples. Some addons even resulted in multiple, separate support threads. Confusing.  A simple, developer-maintained support site fixes this.

Second (related), I will now know where to go on the EE support site to scan a list of addons by the recency of their introduction. I do this on Devotee, but I spend more time here and welcome this new categorization. (I would prefer keeping the site introductions and the addon announcements separate, if possible).

Finally, I agree that BitBucket et al offer excellent free/low-cost mechanisms that facilitate open-source development of addons. And, per the ‘endless support thread’ problem cited in the first point above, this should reduce (not increase) the burden of repeated support questions from users.

Actually I already use Github. I can’t help but feel these social coding sites are aimed at a different audience than the typical EE user; wikis and issue trackers don’t allow the free-form conversation that arises in a forum.

The MODx community handles third party add-ons in an interesting way; every user contribution is added to a common repository and a forum post is generated automatically for support questions. Every add-on is searchable from one place, and ‘how-to’ questions get answered by everyone, not just the original contributor. I like that.

I’m not recommending that every add-on be hosted at a social coding site.  I’m saying that if a forum thread is “good enough” for the developer and the user, then these sites are far better alternatives, and would not be off putting to people for whom a forum thread was also “good enough”.  Many professionals might not consider an add-on at all if it doesn’t have a proper site and indicator of long-term support.

But for people who will download and implement an add-on from a forum attachment, I think they’ll be fine with it, indeed happier.  As for not having free form conversations - the issue trackers on these sites are very much like forums, but instead of putting all conversations into a single thread, you have a separate thread and conversation for each issue.  Much higher signal to noise, easier to search, easier to reach definitive conclusions.

Some of the support site designs are quite forum-like .... developers can pick one that matches their support style. Also, most addon developers could use their own instance of the EE forum module conveniently, if maintaining the same feel (free-form conversation) is desirable.

If one grants the overall benefits of this move, a savvy EE add-on dude/ette might ASAP create a Get Satisfaction community infrastructure as a central home for multiple EE addon developers.

[EDIT: heck, offer a third-party hosted instance of an EE forum that multiple add-on developers can use to provide support threads just as they had done here ....]

This would be a route to earning some extra bucks and/or building their own reputation. Devotee didn’t begin with direct support from EllisLab, but served as a vehicle for Ryan Masuga to market/leverage his own work by helping the community.

I think we might be missing the forest for the trees here. I don’t see this as a BitBucket/GitHub/WhateverElse discourse. It’s about Devot:ee and the EE forums.

As I mentioned in response to Iain Urquhart’s post about all this, we’re forgetting a key piece of the big picture: Devot:ee isn’t just any old third-party anymore—it’s a Community Partner now. This isn’t a fragmentation of the community. Rather, in my optimistic view, it’s a chance for these two great resources to be unified into one community.

The EE forums are meant to support a single product—Expression Engine—and for myriad reasons, this makes them a really ineffective vehicle for supporting a thousand different addon products by a thousand different developers. Sure, we’ve been successful at making it work thus far, but I think the point of this move is that we could be doing so much better, both for devs and for end users.

Here, we’re seeing the development forums restored to their purpose—discussion about development. And, we’re seeing the addon site ascend to its purpose—becoming the definitive encyclopedia of addons. EllisLab is moving to give more complete support to its community partners. I think that has to happen if these partnerships are going to be successful.