By Anibal Sanchez on 2020-07-01 11:33 in Extensions Directory Team

The Joomla! Extensions Directory (JED) team met on June 26th, 2020, at 15hs UTC, via Glip to discuss our progress of current tasks.

• In attendance: Anibal Sanchez, Carlos Cámara, Claire Mandville, Hugh Douglas-Smith, Jaz Parkyn, Luca Marzo, Mark Lee and Wilco Alsemgeest (Assistant to the Department Coordinator)

• Absent: Daniel Dubois, Dénes Székely

Team Organization

• We are processing the queue of new extensions and pending tickets within the seven days processing window. With the addition of new members, we are improving the processing times.

• In July, we are migrating our accounts to @community.joomla.org

• The board approved the Joomla Property Management Policy: extensions.joomla.org - home for all the extendable parts within Joomla (components, module, plugins, VEL, templates). https://www.opensourcematters.org/organisation/directors/policies/297-joomla-property-management-policy.html

Plans

• JED LinkChecker - Next Phases: we are adding stricter validations to the link validations

• FAQ for Joomla 4: The production team will continue the effort

• JED-VEL Merge of Operations: We are planning the migration to be done in the next few weeks. For more information #175

• JED Newsletter: After the release of Joomla 4 Beta 2, we plan to send a newsletter based on the official information for extension developers - to be provided by the Production Team -.

• JED Design Updates: General review of the site design for mobile and desktop. Renewal of JED general visual technology and design. #139

• List Q1: Quality Requirements of Extensions To improve the current extension quality requirements, we are defining a new set of minimum rules. The idea is to improve the minimum information submitted by the extension developers. #149

  • At this point, these are the rules that we are currently proposing:

    • Listings in English 

    • Project or Download page at least in English

    • Screenshots in English

    • Provide English language files

    • Links linking to the right page (E.g. the demo link must target a proper demo)

    • Screenshots with logo and/or an accurate representation of the extension

• JED Checker CI Online. This is project scope: https://github.com/joomla/jed-issues/wiki/JED-Extensions-Checker-CI. At the FFTF, Andy Gaskell and Llewellyn van der Merwe joined the JED Dev Team to support the effort. #67 and #133

JED 4 Project

• JED4 development has been continuing. To contribute to the project, join the team!

• The board approved the proposal to make the new JED 4 codebase and project information available publicly.

• The Review Detective and Review Scores will be kept private within the JED team.

• This is the JED 4 Project Scope Summary. To simplify the project coordination, we have the JED - Developer Chat room in Glip for developers to work on JED4. Please, join the JED Dev Chat on Glip to discuss the scope and access the rest of the materials we are working on.

• The JED 4 development repository has been published: https://github.com/joomla/com_jed4. Please, check the list of issues and collaborate with the development.

• According to the approved Joomla Property Management Policy, JED4 will also manage templates. 

Proposed JED Guidelines for Joomla 4

• Potential backward compatibility issues in Joomla 4

• Frequently Answered Questions about Joomla 4

• New extensions guidelines for J4 and JED Checker CI for Joomla 4. #67

• Minimum technical requirements: We have been discussing the steps to manage extensions for Joomla 3, and Joomla 4 after Joomla 4 is released, to keep compatibility with minimum technical requirements for Joomla 3 and encourage the usage of PHP latest stable version and security practices.

• Override Everything: All assets should go through HTML helper or web assets. In this way, the assets are overridable, and scripts can be put in the footer and still work. Restrict handwritten script tags in the output (This needs to go through addScriptDeclaration). Include assets ONLY in the layouts, not in the main logic.

Scoring Issues

• An issue on the extensions scoring has been reported. We are looking for a developer to evaluate the current algorithm and fix the issue. For more information #84

Spam Checks for Reviews

The current system to process Spam Review needs to be revamped. The current implementation has several shortcomings that must be addressed.

In the short term, to clarify the validation output, we are improving the messages shown to the user. Spam Checkup can fail due to the following points:

• You may be using an IP masking service

• A VPN

• A server is actively running on your desktop IP

In the medium term, we are planning to redefine the system and implement a new checkup in the context of the JED4 project. We are updating the progress in the implementation here #65.