JED Team Meeting - February 2nd, 2018 - Extensions Directory Team

Today the Joomla! Extensions Directory (JED) team met at 2 pm GMT via Glip to discuss our progress of current tasks.

In attendance: Jaz Parkyn, Anibal Sanchez, Aleksander Kuczek, Dénes Székely, Mark Lee, Luca Marzo and Troy Hall.
Absent: Daniel Dubois, Darek Śnieg, Hugh Douglas-Smith, Markus Bopp, Martin Mueller, Miron Savan, Paul Franklin, Sotiris Katsaniotis.

Plans for Joomla 4

Joomla 4 Readiness Survey: We are running a survey on the JED Developers list to know more about the adoption of J4 Alpha 1. As a summary: Most people have installed J4 A1, but they didn't go further beyond the initial installation. Most people don't know that Joomla supports any web framework and that J4 will be accessible. The detailed results can be found here and here.
A new edition of the survey will be published (for the next J4 Alpha) to the general list of users to gather more feedback and monitor the adoption process.
As a consequence of the required changes of Joomla 4, the internal reorganization in the current Joomla 3.8 release is causing issues on extensions that rely on class names like JUser, JMail, JUri, etc. For more information about Joomla 4 and Potential backward compatibility issues.
JED has now the checkbox for J4 compatibility, and a new menu "Compatible with J4 Alpha" has been published to feature J4 extensions.

JED 4 Specification: JED4 spec is nearly complete. More efforts are necessary to define the 2018 plan. At this time, we are evaluating the available resources and possible technologies for the future implementation. Volunteers will develop the JED4 in a series of sprints. The reviews and scoring functionality will remain a closed subject, and its code will not present to the JED Devs - only available to JED Team Members.
JED Full-Text Search. Search improvements candidates. We are considering Algolia or Elastic Search. No decision yet on the supporting technology. We are exploring possible partnerships.

Following the initial phase, we are working on the second stage:

More SEO Improvements have been applied to the profile area to avoid content duplication at search engines.
Recently Added, Top Rated, Most Viewed modules are coming, on incremental small/new changes.
New scrolling widgets (similar to Google Play style).

The Review Checking Process

The efforts to improve the process are ongoing. We expect further additions in the short term. We are already working on an updated review (IP Detective) checker that Hugh is setting up.
Hugh has been working on migrating the IP Detective for the reviews over to our server. The work is nearing completion now, just a few bugs to fix. When done, we also have some new rules to put on the checker.
There are still pending issues (Error 500 source of the problem) that need to be fixed before implementing the new service on the live platform.

Migration to Github: In January 2018, we have migrated the central repository to Github.
Issues reported in Bitbucket will remain on that platform for future reference.

We've been discussing several complex cases to define a consistent support strategy and enforce the terms of service.