In Sorrento we had a nice discussion about how to let "good", advisable and most used products bubble up, being more discoverable and easy to start up with (documentation, good quality, etc.).
You can find a brief report at http://www.coactivate.org/projects/plog2013/products-party.
Why a Plone Products Shortlist.
To improve *good* products discoverability (where thumbs up/down are not enough).
To increase the general quality of products (better documentation, more updates, etc.).
To facilitate promotion/diffusion of Plone extensions and distributions (i.e. bundles of products: Plumi, anyone?).
How to have all this with little effort?
A shortlist of products, properly advised by the community (read below), could be easy enough to maintain and update every now and then.
Compiling the List.
How many items to list?
At PLOG, we decided to go for 50 (fifty), classified into various categories.
What criteria to be matched?
Must have, or you are out - no exception:
- have a page on plone.org/products
- have a decent, up-to-dated readme, that begins explaining what the product does
- have a public source repository
- ready to be translated
- released on pypi
- [anything else missing here?]
Plus, to win over competitors:
- being up-to-date with the last stable plone release (i.e. 4.3, at the moment)
- good screenshots, if applicable
- screencasts, if applicable
- issue tracker
- enduser documentation
- translated in main languages
- link to real-life uses, reviews or blog posts on using the product
- already used in real cases
- tested
- travis
- buildout examples
- clear dependencies declared
- actively maintained by more than one person
- [your suggestion here!]
Note: we will decide together the weight of each :)
The open space session at PLOG that ended up in the Products Shortlist idea.
Get Inspired.
This is not a brand new idea, actually, and looking around you'll find different approaches, like for instance:
- asking on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1820232/essential-plone-add-ons
- assembling a collaborative complete buildout: http://weblion.psu.edu/ploneedu/projects/buildout/buildout
- lanching a "share your favorites" meme, as in: a Plone site in two days, a recipe for a nonprofit Plone site, hidden gems of the Plone Collective
- [let's put here how you got inspired in the past]
All these approaches were and are welcome! Unfortunately, AFAIK none of them were aquired by the Plone community as a whole.
How to use the Plone Products Shortlist.
If we accomplish the mission to define a first products shortlist, we can use it in many ways:
- spot the shortlist as an "advised extensions" box on the products section
- add a "shortlist quality" seal on the single product page
- use the shortlist in the right locations to let newbies feel more welcome
- base some kind of prize on it (at conferences, along the year, ..)
- inspire editorial reviews, when they are still missing
- [your ideas here!]
So, mind to share your Plone Extensions?
If you like this playground, you're more than welcome to help.
We need experienced Plone experts to help complete and review the shortlist until we are ready to publish a 1.0 version to use.
- Go review the current state of the products shortlist.
- Send your quick suggestions with a comment on this post.
- Ask Philip Bauer or me to get editorial rights on the list, and try not to waste the others work :)
Waiting for your help!