My issue is that I manage alot of Joomla websites, and they all use quite a few extensions each. I'm right now having a hard time keeping track of what extensions are available in which versions, and which sites I need to/can upgrade to newer versions. By conneting to each site I can look up their respective information to find out what components they have installed and what versions they are. I haven't done this already, but I don't see how that will be a problem. Next challenge I face is finding out what is the most recent version of that exact extension, and here I think the extensions site could be useful, so this is my suggestion again:
It would be great to have extension data available in XML (or some other easy parsable format for that matter).
My alternative would be to manage these manually and look them up every now and then, or have a bot spider the extensions site to fetch the most recent version numbers. Neither options are very tempting.
Possible uses for the XML solution:
- In my Joomla install I could easily spot which extensions needed upgrading: Your version 4.5. Latest version 4.6
- Developers would get a standard way of adding and displaying extension data in their extension so that this would be done in the same fashion in all extensions. Neat and handy if you changed homepage for your extension for instance, or if one wanted to publish a news item for the extension.
- I could make a complete list of:
- Which sites I manage
- What extensions they have installed
- What extensions need upgrading
I'm guessing this would be a step forward security wise for Joomla!, since people probably would have an easier time keeping track of what extensions they need to upgrade.
Drawback would be that it adds some server load from for instance version lookup request.
What do you think?
