[Typo3-dev] Extension reviewing process (request for discussion)

[Michael Scharkow]

Hi,

I am wondering what became of the extension reviewing project because I 
have not seen much news about it lately. The reason I ask is that the 
full list of available extensions is taking years to display because 
it's so long :) While choice is good, I think there needs to be more 
information about the quality of the extensions so I won't have to 
download all of them and test them myself.

The following points are bugging me personally:

1. Lots of extensions don't seem to be maintained or developed anymore. 
They should be marked deprecated or even deleted if they are superseded 
by some other extensions.

2. While there is a compatibility field for the supported Typo3 version, 
I'd really like to know if an extension is DBAL-compatible and produces 
XHTML, or in short, adheres to the coding guidelines.

3. There is IMHO too much redundancy in TER, at least 3 event management 
extensions, a lot of news stuff etc. Maybe extension authors should be 
encouraged to merge their extensions if they serve a similar purpose.

Finally, I think the review process as outlined on typo3.org is too 
ambitious because a) there's only a handful of reviewers, b) the 
reviewers are hand-selected, c) the review process does not seem to be 
very transparent (which I think is very necessary for such delicate 
tasks as reviewing) and d) they will *never* be able to review the loads 
of extensions that pop up on TER every week.

So what I'm proposing here is a two-step reviewing process with a kind 
of reviewing platform for the community (NOT a simple rate this item 
crap!) which could probably be implemented within the bugtracker or the 
wiki. There should be simple guidelines about what to review (coding 
guidelines, compatibility, documentation) and only the extensions which 
fulfill those basic requirements should be passed to the Reviewers Team 
who can then judge originality, style and coolness.

With this process we could ensure both quantitative and qualitative 
aspects of extension reviewing.

Greetings,
Michael