Help Improve the Extras

So, the problem I was trying to solve in response to @nuan88 was the issue where the Extra listings and descriptions are inadequate or suboptimal in helping MODX site builders know which Extra to choose and why.

I’m trying to consider a way we can help Extras developers provide really useful and informative taglines, short and long descriptions so that when people are browsing for solutions, they will be selected when they’d be appropriate.

Poor descriptions has been a longstanding issue and I’d love to help find ways we can help offer suggestions that will help the community and the authors. Maybe some form of mentorship or maybe an author could request peer review of the listing to make sure it accurately describes and answers what the Extra does.

Maybe we could make the form better—although I wonder often if the issue is that the form is in English and for ESL folks this could be already a struggle and adding more words may not get better results.

Anyhow. I’m not worried about more Extras when we’re far below 1000 published and maintained Extras compared to some CMSs that have in the 10s of thousands.

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I am not a developer of course, but here are two things that could help possibly

Clear Requirements: I assume many devs are not wordsmiths. When they get a general question, what does it do, for example, the result isn’t going to go well oftentimes. They might just get frustrated, or they might give info which is highly technical, its hard to describe a thing for outsiders when you’ve been messing around in guts of it for months.

So, your idea for short description, long, and so on is great. Define tightly what info they you want, that will help them probably.

Second thing is, as you say, language. it wouldn’t be too hard to get an RU version of the questions, at least?

Wouldn’t this provide RU descriptions, though? How about giving the RU description to someone who is confident in making a good english translation? I’m sure someone over at modx.pro could handle that.

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Oh good point, hadn’t thought about that. Yes, we need to figure out how to get a lot of this RU content into English, and we can’t expect the devs to do it