Sandbox

Hi,
there's a feature I would really love to see:
-  LATEST REVIEWS / Most Recent Reviews.
This is always interesting to see, by what visitors have been recently interested in.
Most reviewed extension seems to always be the same, and thus it is uninteresting if you wish to discover anything new.

Otherwise other suggestion (minors, in comparison to the first):
- I'd like to see a confirmation that a content has been sent after writing a review or submitting a new extension.
I think it is disturbing when you go back directly to the website . (at least at the first visit)

- Smileys for reviews, spell checking 

Hi mehdi,

Thanks for your suggestions.
Any user feedback will be taken in consideration for the continued improvement of the Extensions Directory.
Some ideas might be implemented and we do appreciate feedback from the users.

We will discuss a better visual confirmation after submitting. Thanks for pointing this out.

For spell checking you are welcomed to use the 'Report this listing' including a note about spelling, and perhaps an example of a better combination of the used letters 

Another suggestion:
reverse numbering of reviews from oldest (n°1) to newest, seems more logical..
Don't mean display order, just numbering.

I forgot this one.
When you submit an extension, I guess you are very interested to get notifications when a user submit a review...

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,

yabba dabba-
  I understand where you are coming from. The demand for the Extensions Directory is huge as quantified by the Rochen team here:
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,59204.0.html

  A goal of the Extensions Directory is to one day be able to directly interface with the J!Forge. This would include direct download links and possibly some of the other features you've mentioned. Until then, we rely on the developers and the community to help us keep the information and links current. If you find a problem with any of the extensions in the directory, please report it to the Editorial Team. Each extension has the "Report" link on its detailed view page.

Thanks for your input! 

eyezberg wrote:Another suggestion:
reverse numbering of reviews from oldest (n°1) to newest, seems more logical..
Don't mean display order, just numbering.

BTW, this change was implemented weeks ago. Thanks for pointing it out, eyezberg.