When I try to search for an extra (for example: ‘reservation’) on this page: MODX Extras | Lean, Flexible, Community-Made Extensions, there are no results. But I’m sure there are some Extra’s that offer an reservation functionality, like Planyon. Also searching for other terms does not give relevant results.
Here’s a link for Planyo. You’re right that it doesn’t come up when you search for Reservation at modx.com/extras (I found it with a Google search for MODX Extras Reservation). Nor does it come up when you search for Planyo from the MODX extras page. I don’t know why.
It was released in 2010 and never updated. The download is not a transport package, so you couldn’t install it in Package Manager. It may be a MODX Evolution package. It would probably be easier to go the Planyo website and download the current version, then try to adapt it for use with MODX.
I think there’s another MODX reservation package, but I can’t remember the name and couldn’t find it at modx.com/extras.
Here’s a link for Rocket Booking.
Thanks, I thought it was outdated. Found it by Googling.
But no Extra shows up at all when searching for ‘reservation’ at all. I guess they didn’t add a decent description with the extra (which is a general MODX issue in my opinion).
I will look into Rocket Booking
This is a fair point, however, it’s really up to the authors of their Extras to describe them using language that will help others aid in their discovery (aka SEO). We don’t necessarily know what synonym matches to choose. In the case of Rocket Booking, the author used booking and events but not reservation—this may even be cultural as the author is American vs European.
Unfortunately, even with improved search in our soon-to-be-launched new Extras site, we’ll not be able to capture all such matches and it may require the seeker to try synonyms. There’s not currently a way to automate the generation of the search engine’s synonym list. This is likely why @bobray was able to find them using Google because it has it’s own language processing and synonyms handling.
It’s counterintuitive, but Google almost always does better job than a local search. It provides a more fruitful search of Bob’s Guides, as well as these forums. Google can afford to index every word at a site, then use their massive brain to provide a heuristic site search.
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Bob’s Guides always show up yes 
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Reservations are actually different from bookings, but in some cases integrated in an extra/plugin. I did try ‘bookings’ as a synonym. But more text in the description also helps preventing this, because Google knows how to interpret that.
Regarding descriptions at extra’s: most times it’s just 1-2 lines of text, and a like to Github for ‘further information’. That doesn’t tell and sell.
I hear your point. We’ve struggled forever with this but it’s a challenge for us to force Extra developers who are giving away their efforts for free to write effective marketing and SEO copy for their Extras. There just isn’t any incentive for them beyond trying to be helpful. We do not have people on our team who can review them to then write better descriptions for them. We only have the bandwidth to review them for risks to users.
Most of the time we get a description of how it works rather than the problem it solves and examples of use case.
That said, we are about to relaunch Extras and in the near future we could make it possible for the community to suggest improvements to the description or listing. I’m not sure how that would work but I do agree, finding the extras that will help build your project is valuable to MODX as a whole.
I don’t understand why you would put hundreds of hours work in an extra and then not give a description or explanation for users what it does.
Wordpress plugins are well described most times.