Kudos for the work done so far. It is very nice to be able to see the breadth and depth of extensions.
My one major gripe is the difficulty of evaluating said extensions.
Where is the extension download? Is the extension really current? Is it a dedicated J-extension or is it an M-extension that just so happens to run on J? Is it supported now? Is there a support forum? Is it active? Will it be support in the future as J and M diverge? How many people have used this extension? ad nauseam.
In general, having found an extension listing in the extensions area, it is extraordinarily time consuming to track it down and evaluate it. Is it at sourceforge, mamboexchange, or some other site? Do I have to register yet again to download it? Do I have to wait to be "approved" to do anything? Where is the support forum? Do I have to register yet again for support? If there are multiple forums associated with an extension, which is the most active? Is it a released extension or something that has been in beta for months? Is it stable enough to risk installing it? Etc.
I don't know if there is an ideal solution to this, but an alternate solution that I find MUCH more useful is employed by vBulletin. Their extensions are all organized into a separate site (
http://www.vbulletin.org) which provides a platform for not only LISTING available extensions, but also ORGANIZING them by source type, application category, core version support, etc. It also provides a single point for ACCESSING and downloading code, developing code, support, etc. It also tracks installations, popularity, and general extension activity. And of course, granular extension activity notifications are readily available. In short, for extension related issues, I virtually never have to leave that one site. And my one registration takes care of it all.
If you have plans to consolidate all these features into the extensions site, great. I'll wait patiently.
Best Regards,
