Our company wants to offer a “plugin gallery” or “app store” where users of our (packaged enterprise software) product can find, download, and share plugins to our product. I’m assuming we’ll have to build our own site (although a “buy” solution would be welcome), so we’re looking for inspiration. Who’s done this right?
My experience with mainstream app-stores/plugin-galleries (e.g. Mozilla’s or Microsoft’s) is not good. You have to wade through a lot of crap to find what you want, the browse interface is usually frustrating, and choosing between multiple similar items is hard.
On the other end of the spectrum, sites like CodePlex or SourceForge allow rich collaboration around individual projects, but they seem like much more comlpexity than we need and don’t generally do a great job at browse/search/vote scecnarios required to help non-developers find the right plugin.
Honestly, what I’m looking for is something like what StackOverflow would be if it focused on uploads and downloads rather than Questions and Answers. I’m looking for sites which innovatively harnesses human motivation (e.g. love to play games, waste time, and be popular but hate to do busywork) in order to produce more content and better discoverability for everyone.
What’s your favorite site(s) which do innovative things in this space? I’ll accept the answer with the coolest examples. This could be one site which blows me away or several which combine really good ideas. Extra credit for an opensource or commercial solution we can re-brand and use ourselves!
Some requirements I’m thinking about are below, so you can get an idea of what we’re looking to do:
Must Have
- ability to upload, download, review, and rate (ideally upvote/downvote, not stars) plugins
- uses tags for categorization
- great browse experience (by tag, by votes, etc.)
- good search, including metadata filtering (e.g. by product version or author) and custom sorting (e.g. by votes or recency)
- community-based moderation (like StackOverflow’s) to lighten the load on moderators
- low-noise, high-relevance UI (unlike Mozilla’s image overload)
- exceptional SEO (for finding plugins from Google)
- HTTP APIs so we can browse & search for plugins from inside our product
- smart ways to incent desired behaviors, especially lots of good uploads (e.g. points, badges, hall-of-fame pages, etc.)
- for uploads, the ability to host screenshots, HTML description, and (obviously) the uploaded plugins
Should have
- a “wanted” section where folks can post requests for desired plugins (and others can upvote those requests)
- a good way to integrate paid and free plugins in the UI so free authors, paid authors, and downloaders don’t feel screwed
- a way to editorially feature plugins, aka “ads” 🙂
- a way to ask and answer questions about plugins (hint: we’re probably using a StackExchange site for our supoprt Q&A)
- awareness of things like versioning, licensing, pricing, and other stuff that applies to software downloads
- UI and community model optimized to work well for 2000 plugins
- a way to get direct access to the underlying database of metadata about each plugin, so we can run sophisticated queries that regular keyword search can’t handle
Nice to have
- a collaboration environment where multiple users can work on plugins together
- a “private area” for sharing plugins with a restricted audience (e.g. only my company)
- issue tracker for contributors to do primitive support issue tracking
- payments integration
I don’t think you will find an existing Open Source product that fits 100% of your “Must Have”. I don’t know an application that does all that.
May be if you find one application that match 60% of your needs you could add the remaining 40% functionalities you need on top of the existing application?
For example, you could base your application on something like Open Source Rails (MIT license) and adapt it to your needs using additional Rails plugins.
I think it’s better than start your own application from scratch.
Good luck!