Adding Products or Modules

1. Our Questions

• Given a feature that requires an add-on, is the product easy to find?
• How long does it take to install a new add-on? many new add-ons?
• If an add-on is out of date, what to do?
• Are the add-ons easy to use, documented, and tested?

2. General Overview

Doug Vann

Drupal

The Drupal community works tightly together to make new modules and keep old ones feature rich, fast, and secure.

When a new API or service is released somewhere on the web, teams will often gather in code sprints to update existing modules or create new ones if needed.

CLI tools exist to install and enable and update modules and themes.

Composer and drush.make files can be used to bring in modules and their libraries and dependencies.

Drupal has improved greatly over years with regard to documentation. Often, any given Module page will provide a link to the Documentation page for that module. That documentation page is editable by any Drupal community member and revision states are kept for research and review by admins.

Calvin Hendryx-Parker

Plone

Plone 5’s core is very rich, which reduces the need for community-developed add-ons.

Most Plone products are well built. We have tools like mr.bob to make creating new add-ons easier by handling all the boilerplate portions of making a product.

Lots of popular add-ons like Lineage and PloneFormGen are now supported in Plone 5.

PloneFormGen is a notable add-on for managing online forms. It will soon have a new Dexterity-based replacement. Lineage is the multisite management tool for Plone; it is used extensively in higher ed.

3. Add-On Repositories

Doug Vann

Drupal

Drupal.org hosts the project pages for all of the modules and has downloads and issue trackers built right into the site.

Calvin Hendryx-Parker

Plone

Plone has moved away from hosting add-on products on plone.org directly and is now using the Python Community repository called PyPI. If you want to report issues for the Plone add-on, you would generally need to head over to the project’s Github page and use the issue tracker associated with that project's repository.