Alternative plugin repo

Hi all,

I am getting more and more notices from the Elgg team that I am violating the terms for posting plugins on this site. It's getting quite annoying. Is there an alternative location to host non-GPL plugins? If not, do we want to start something like that? I could obviously host my plugins on my own server, but having a centralized place would benefit everyone.

  • @ihayredinov it looks like, i am against selling plugins to community members generally
    no!
    i agree with you, to offer plugins for money on centralized place e. g . your server
    :-)

  • If you do not recognize the elgg independent developers, then this part of the web (elgg.org) will become or is just for hobbiest on free on a shared server. I came here in Nov of 2010 and knew nothing and wasted 2 months trying to find a developer that could help me! I would have been nice if there was a hard link for professional services that was accessable from the front page. As you can see there is NO activity. Why is that? Is it because it is too hard to see? That would be my guess. Another reason is listed in the Group Terms:
    "Sellers Please don't open new threads to list your information and paid services."
    Why is there not a group for Themes within Professional Services? 
    Why is elgg.com not listed there? In the begining, for me, this would have been an option!

    I am a webmasters and like myself, there are others here, who are trying to make a living in the social envrornment and are here to have a hands on approach to their products they are packaging for their clients or their own projects. What is the harm if a member anywhere on elgg says "I want a profile that jumps through hoops, is there a plugin that will do that?" and a developer says "sure, send me a PM and I will give you a quote." That senarrio is not allow on elgg except for group "professional services". 

    @Cash Is this an option for this upstarting collective? Say elggalaxy or elggdev hosted the collabration of commercial plugins and as price of admission to this collective would be to become a supported of elgg.org? This would at least get them listed on this page

    Steve

  • Some history in response to some of the comments:

    Curverider started community.elgg.org sometime in August 2008. From my outsider's position, it seemed that they did not give it a lot of attention and there was one occasion where they got close to shutting it down.

    After running for a year, there were a lot of complaints about the site and the community itself. Developers were uploading crippled plugins with links to commercial functional plugins (those have all been removed). Some were uploading empty files and then insisting that you donate to them first before they would email you the plugin. Some developers were using the community site as their personal SEO place (leaving links to their sites all over the place).

    People would come into the community, start trying to build a site, and ask a question. They would get responses from developers offering their services or empty responses that said they had better pay because advice like this costs money. It was rare to get a helpful response. This drove a lot of people away (either from Elgg completely or from the community site).

    I trace the changes for the better to when Brett became a core developer and took an active role on this community site. Over the last 2 years, we have put a lot of effort into making this a more welcoming community site. Occasionally we have made some of the developers unhappy with some of the restrictions, but I'm pleased overall with the progress.

    The Elgg Foundation will be taking over the community site in the next few months. We'll have more freedom on what we do with the site. I was never involved in any of the decisions but I think there was always a fine line on how to handle developers advertising commercial services when the site was run by a commercial company.

    Obviously, there are some people who come to the community site looking for free advice and support. They do not want to ask a question and get back quotes for that help. Other people would love to submit project requirements and get back quotes from developers. The professional services does a really poor job for this last group. My own opinion is it would be great to support both but make them very distinct areas of the site to limit confusion. I'm sure there will be more discussion on this in the future.

    In case someone missed it, there is a google group created by Ismayil that already has some activity: http://groups.google.com/group/elgg-plugin-repository

  • A distinct area on the community site for commercial services would be a nice idea.

    Question is: Who has time to build it, test it, debug it?

    Seems to me that we could kill 2 birds with one stone here. If some 3rd party developers want to have a place for commercial plugins/services why not get together and build a plugin for it and submit it to the core team. If it's useable perhaps the core team will consider enabling it on elgg.org and everyone would be happy. Core team saves on workload, 3rd party devs get what they want...

    I guess it all depends on whether the concept of commercialization is accepted on the community site in any form.

  • Trajan, I think your idea is very good. We would have to have a decision from Elgg team before we start building such plugin though. My contribution to current repository waited a few months for being approved and finally didn't land on Elgg.org. I think we need closer cooperation with Elgg team here so that we are sure plugin will be commited once it's completed.

    If we decide to create a separate portal for commercial plugins, I think it would be best if it was governed by Foundation as well.

     

    Cash, thank you for your comment. One more comment from my side - you mentioned policies of Joomla and Drupal. I think Elgg shouldn't mimic those engines since they're in a different position than Elgg right now. It should rather pursue what Joomla and Drupal were pursuing. They focused on creating large base of customers and large base of developers and helping them cooperate. I think Elgg should follow this idea.

  • Cash, I think the support of elgg.org is essential to make this work. I was wondering if you could deliberate with the team and let us know exactly what your level of interest/involvement can be, if any?

  • Mike, I posted on your submission regarding the plugin repository long ago on Trac. It is not complete. http://trac.elgg.org/ticket/2444

    Choices made now on what is allowed on the community site set the course for the Elgg community. If we want to develop a strong FOSS community, we need to make decisions designed to reach that goal. We cannot build a commercially focused community, grow it, and then suddenly switch to FOSS once we get big enough (whatever big enough) means. I appreciate that having a strong community of developers is important. I appreciate that developers need to earn income. I also know that developers will earn a lot more income building sites using Elgg than selling plugins. We (the core team) have not had a chance to discuss this but as I said before, I think there are things that can be done on the community site to make it easier for people to find/communicate with developers. The immediate priority is moving trac, the wiki, and the community site onto new servers. In the meantime, we can certainly continue the discussion.

    There is a ton of work in creating a commercial plugin store for multiple developers. Building the site, interacting with customers, publicizing it, reviewing plugin quality, handling billing and support. I'd think you would need to hire someone to at least do part-time support for the site. It is a big undertaking.

    Ismayil, what do you mean by support of elgg.org?

  • . . . and there are tons of work to customize the old plugins to elgg 1.8 ;-))


    are your plugins all ready for elgg 1.8 ?

    before you talk about selling plugins
    you muss think about this:
    no one will pay for (sorry) 'old' plugins

    from my point of view elgg is ready for the 'success story' with elgg 2.0
    till this time there is a lot to do

    ellg is no 'beauty' ;-))
    the charm of elgg comes from things you can't see
    it's the solid db and software structure
    and the potential of wonderful people . . . . :-)

    because only some people can have a plan over all
    and because cash, brett, evan and some excellent coder do the most
    they can say where the way goes

    i am happy about how they think about the future of elgg
    and how elgg could be better and successful
    i said it before, this is a great luck for the elgg community

  • As an active Elgg plugin developer with a dozen plugins in the repository, I thought that I'd jump in with my two cents.

    I have a different model from many - I charge for development time, not software. That is entirely compatible with the GPL and fortunately most of my clients actively encourage me to release their code.

    What I want is clear and accurate bug reports and testing results, not money.

    Unfortunately, I don't always get those. A case in point is my cron notifications plugin, which has been up for almost a month (for testing only) here:

    http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/project/711303/developer/kevin/cron-notifications

    with 68 downloads and not a word of real testing feedback.

    That is very frustrating to me, but I don't think that creating another plugin repository would solve the problem. I think that we should just improve the one we have, something Cash and Brett have already been working hard to do, I know.

  • Ohh :-/ ,many problems if get paid or not ...

    For the Elgg team ---> Charge a cost for the elgg project for download, to see if this "super coders busy people" will like it;)