Thanks, @Glib_Glugovskiy ! It’s good to see a concrete proposal to establish a proper marketplace listing.
I have found myself at this thread for another reason, though-- something important I’d like to bring up. While we work on this marketplace, the current Open edX extensions directory is quite out of date and I don’t think we should wait for this new marketplace to be ready before we update the entries in the old one. For now, this one is the authoritative listing for anyone searching the web for a list of blocks, even if it doesn’t hit SEO all that well (a factor I’m grateful the new proposal explicitly intends to address.)
Several months back, we submitted an entry (the Kinescope XBlock) to the extensions directory and it is still yet to be published. In the intermediating time I’ve had many back-and-forth conversations with community members over Slack and email about the fact we’re still waiting on publication. It occurred to me that it’s time to bring this out into public-- and perhaps this should have been done earlier-- since it has been devolving into a game of Telephone for a while, with long latency periods.
I have been informed that the directory is ‘broken’, but haven’t gotten a straight answer on what’s wrong-- even after I (and others at OpenCraft) offered to help fix it. I’d like to publicly reiterate this offer. If given access, I will personally go in and fix it if it allows us to publish the backlog of extensions we’ve accrued.
Speaking of which, considering the length of time this has taken and the confusion even I, as someone who is active in the community, have had, I’m sure we’re not the only ones holding on to extensions we would like to see published in the short term, without waiting for an entirely new plugin system to be completed or made visible. To that end, I’m sharing this document where we’ve been collecting our own extensions ready for publication, and where we invite others to do the same if they also need/want to list extensions in the short term, so we can get a big update done in one go. Send an edit request and I’ll admit you.
What do we need to do to fix the existing directory so we can use it while the new one is being built?