­Following the Plone Conference in Seattle, a number of people have become interested in improving Plone's third-party products story. Read on if you are interested in helping out.

Background

Many people are frustrated by having multiple products doing the same job, or products that are not yet mature or stable or supported in the plone.org Products section. Managing quality as part of product metadata is becoming more important, but this requires work from volunteers.

What can you do?

There are a number of things we can do, going into three broad categories:

• Improving the capabilities of the PloneSoftwareCenter, which powers plone.org/products
• Producing documentation custom research papers on best practices to help product authors write better software
• Rating, reviewing and gardening the products on plone.org

What skills do we need?

We need a number of different types of people to help out:

• Architects (Alexander Limi, Martin Aspeli, heckling crowds) to design practical solutions. This involves not only the software, but also the applicable community processes the software supports.
• Archetypes developers to help improve the PloneSoftwareCenter. Some familiarity with unit/integration/functional testing, using Zope 3 views and general best practice is helpful resume services (and helping out here would be a good way to gain/improve such knowledge!)
• Documentation writers to help us document best practice
• Product reviewers and testers to test existing products, produce reviews, custom essays and ratings (when those facilities have been deployed)
• Product mercenaries - a team of more experienced developers who can offer advise to product authors when they seek it.

If Wicked does its magic, each of the above links will allow people to register their interest and discuss their tasks.

What needs to be done right now?

Please see the PloneSoftwareCenter todo document for more information. This may change as items are ticked off. Use this wiki and the mailing lists to discuss featuers in more detail.