At CiviCon London 2014 the topic of extensions came up in a couple of conversations. Should some extensions be part of core, how do we deal with really good extensions and really bad ones, should we show how many times an extension is downloaded etc. Jaap Jansma and me discussed some more with Lobo on IRC and we decided that we would start with extension reviews. We feel that the extension mechanism is really cool and helps us a lot as developers and as users. We want to stay true to our community spirit, do things together and make sure we can all contribute. And reviewing extensions seemed like a good idea to us.
CiviCooP role and yours
As CiviCooP we will review 2 extension each month. This review is ofcourse nothing more and nothing less than our opinion. And obviously it has very little merit if it just stays our opinion. It might tell you more about Jaap and me than about the actual extension :-) However, if YOU review an extension as well, we suddenly might have a couple of reviews, which actually starts adding value! So please add your reviews of extensions whilst we are in the process of thinking this through and taking our first steps.
Review mechanics
Our initial thoughts are that we take a look at these topics:
- Documentation: is there a clear description of the extension, does it tell us what it does and does it work as documented
- Functionality: are we happy with what the extension does, does it seem logical, do we think it will have merit for (some of) our customers
- Code QA: does the code follow the CiviCRM standard practices, does it seem logical to use and is it relatively easy to understand if we would want to enhance it
- Ease of use: is it easy to install, configure and use
We aim to use 1-5 stars for each topic. Ideally we would want to see those reviews within the extension information on the CiviCRM website, but for our first reviews we will add blog posts.
We'd love to hear your thoughts and see your reviews too!
Erik