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FWIW, The Symphony Extension website is so awesome that I'm not motivated to update the extension directory here and have it reflected in the forums. That being said, I think there needs to be some indicators to point people there to find updates and new extensions.

I'm not motivated to update the extension directory here and have it reflected in the forums

Me neither. I was never quite comfortable with the fact that update notifications would flood the discussion forum with non-discussion messages. I don't think a support/discussion forum is the best way to notify people of updates. So hopefully Allen is working on the new Symphony site which will integrate the Symphony Extensions site a bit.

There are still about 100 extensions that are listed on this site that do not exist on the Symphony Extensions site. designermonkey and I have been contacting owners to figure out the status of the repos. About half of these 100 are considered experiments, deprecated or dead, and so won't ever be migrated.

I would personally be in favour of eventually removing the Extensions area on this site in favour of the Symphony Extensions site, but it's not down to me. Suggestions welcome. While we're at it, the Issues page should simply link directly to Github. Or pull in a list of issues from there. Either way.

I think there needs to be some indicators to point people there to find updates and new extensions

I'm all ears. One solution is to show extension update notifications directly into Symphony which negates the need for people to return to frequently return to a website to find updates.

Another common suggestion has been the ability for people to flag/watch/favourite/mark an extension on the site as one they use regularly. They could then get a page listing these extensions, recent changes, and perhaps a list of commands for cloning/submoduling the whole list.

There is presently no way of sorting extensions by the date at which they were added to the site; only the date of latest release. This is because as we migrate extensions across, their date added is meaningless. But once this is complete, that order might be useful.

Would RSS be of use? It seems that a lot of people are following on Twitter to get update notifications.

Would RSS be of use?

I'd use it.

RSS is indeed welcome.

I too find the Symphony extension site of great help, especially in regard to compatibility and version history, this truly is a pleasure to navigate through extensions. Thank you Nick for your work.

Another common suggestion has been the ability for people to flag/watch/favourite/mark an extension on the site as one they use regularly.

Such feature would be awesome. Sometime I felt that being able to navigate and select a bunch of extension, kind of like a shopping cart, would help. But perhaps the favorite approach would be of more help over time.

Would RSS be of use? It seems that a lot of people are following on Twitter to get update notifications.

Following on Twitter works really well I believe. RSS would be a plus for the non Twitter people. What would be nice is a RSS feed for the blog. Even if there are not that many post, it would still be great to be able to add it to my RSS reader.

There is presently no way of sorting extensions by the date at which they were added to the site; only the date of latest release. This is because as we migrate extensions across, their date added is meaningless. But once this is complete, that order might be useful.

Having a 'Recently viewed' section on the home page could be nice. I sometime found myself looking back at my history to find an extension I had came across.

One more thing - I sometime feel that the search does not take good consideration of extensions names. Try searching 'Date and time' and you will see Nils extension appear somewhere in the list, when I would expect it to appear first, but I guess this is just a question of fine tuning.

Anyway, thanks again for this great site !

+1 for the RSS feed suggestion. I follow on Twitter, but the volume of tweets means that it’s very easy to miss an extension update. It would be great if there were a feed for the blog, a feed for extensions in general, and a feed for individual extensions.

Perhaps the Extension Status extension could be bundled with Symphony in a future release, thus encouraging more people to use it?

Perhaps the Extension Status extension could be bundled with Symphony in a future release, thus encouraging more people to use it?

It's very early days yet, still working out how it should work. But yes hopefully one day :-)

So some common themes:

  • a personal bookmarks/favourites list for keeping track of the extensions you use regularly (which could also help factor in "popularity" on the site)
  • RSS feeds for new extensions, for extension updates and for articles (and a combined feed)
  • search isn't up to scratch (likely because I'm using half-ass search, to be replaced with proper search soon)

and a feed for individual extensions

This isn't something I want to implement. Extension-specific updates should be gleaned by either watching the project on Github or by using the Extension Status extension.

Oh come on Nick, show some love to your brainchildren, even if they are not perfect :)

Added RSS feeds for everything (new and updates) and just new extensions:

Not much there yet as it doesn't apply retrospectively.

My feed reader doesn't display the feed, probably because it's not valid (see http://feedvalidator.org/check?url=http://symphonyextensions.com/rss/).

Been a while since I created an RSS feed! Now validates.

Both RSS feeds are working for me. Many thanks Nick.

Is there any chance of making the search include the readme? Perhaps the readme results should be weighted less, but I think they'd often be relevant.

I did originally but even when down-weighted I found they massively reduced precision: imagine a search for "field", "preferences", "install", which almost all readme's will contain. I'll play around some more, and perhaps default to sorting by relevance if keywords are used, since the default sort order of "last updated" isn't useful when searching.

Hmm, maybe it's not practical, and I should be thinking more about which words are used in other places.

Hmm, not typing in a keyword, leaving Type: all plus choosing Compatibility: 2.3 now renders no results. Bug or feature? :)

Good spot, thank you. I was indexing the compatibility info in ElasticSearch as an object rather than an array so matching was failing. Fixed.

Great thanks!

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