Sandbox

Would it be possible to add a "Price" field to the extensions listings and require commercial extensions to have a posted price?

This would save an enormous amount of time, over the long run, that would normally be spent clicking through sites trying to find pricing information or researching an extension only to find out it's not what one might consider cost-effective for their situation, out of one's price range, etc..

I really like this idea!  I hate to dig around on the target site to find out it's a price I'd never pay... or overlook a commercial extension because I *believe* it's going to be too pricey, only to find out they just ask a $5 donation or whatever.

A good suggestion IMHO. Transparency is always welcome.

I'm not in favor of this. This will also open us to "Look at the great discount you are getting when you want all three components!". The Joomla! Extensions Directory is a resource to find extensions, not an advertizement magazine. Second, Joomla! the open source project has to stay as far away as possible from commercial dealings between service providers and customers.

I agree with Tonie on this. Who is responsible if the price on JED is different to that on the developer's web site? Clearly, the Dev but a lot of folks have problems with distinguishing that JED is just a directory listing, some seem to think that the extension server is the home of the extensions.

Also, I can easily see complaints of prices being lower on JED than actually on the Dev's server, simply to draw visitors in.

The price is a developer issue (or resellers). The store could have discounts, special promotions, etc, and the prices would never be the same at JED and Developer site.
So... no price tags at JED!

i think the extensions should be broken into two main categories first

FREE - with all the current directories

PAID - with all the current directories

That way if you want free stuff you stay in free section.

if you wanna buy something you go to the buy section, personally charging for open source add ons defeats the object of open source. I think there should be NO pay for stuff on this site except for Joomla merch..But at lease the above option will make it OBVIOUS what is free and what is not.

Many times you see something cool, register on yet another site and they find out $10 ? Some of this things are as bad as spam.

I think all files should be available to download from Joomla direct. For free. in return people selling or making plug ins can get a company profile on Joomla site.

But lets keep it all FREE

@Pinhead - not every company would buy into that model, and frankly, I don't think it is the model that we should be using.  Our extensions are a valuable resource, both open source, free, and commercial, paid extensions.

Forcing components to be open source in many situations would result in components simply not being developed.


On the subject of listing prices, maybe this is already encouraged, but perhaps the best solution would be to request/encourage developers to have the price listed on the first page that they link to.  IMO, hiding prices is a bad move on developer's part, though I guess it is pretty common.

We shouldn't enforce this though - not because I don't think it is a good idea, but simply because that would be WAY too much work for the JED team, and it is too much to ask of them to police this sort of thing.

As users, I think the best policy is not to buy anything for which we have to register on a site just to find out the price.  Though, I'm generally too lazy to register - if it looks like there are too many hoops to jump through, I don't bother.

Ian

Please NO!