I think that’s fine and an implementation detail. When registering support for an extension, we can have a “free / paid” checkbox/radio button (and visually display a different icon based on that).
About instead of performing a release, note that I was not suggesting that supporters had to perform a release or anything like that.
Could you elaborate a bit on how this date field would work? A supporter would commit to supporting an extension until a given date? If so, what prevents the supporter to put 10 years for example (and disappearing after 2)?
I think I still prefer to ask every year to any supporter if they still support the extension by sending an email to all supporters once per year. Then, we would provide a singe page listing all extensions marked as supported by a given supporter with the ability to confirm support for all at once or individually, for a new year.
I’d do that for community or companies. I see this less as a problem as long as the company is around → I see it as a problem for companies too since they may not support the same set of extensions every year, dropping some and adding some others, so I still think that even companies should review their support once every year.
What’s important IMO is to present it all in a single page for a global view and and have an easy way to renew all if they’re still ok.
Technically the renewal could be done by storing the current date (per supporter) and we would send a new email one year after that date. Maybe that’s what you meant by the date field?
Yes, exactly, my idea was that we would store the current date, and we could validate both that this date is not in the future and not more than one year in the past.
My point with no expiration for companies was that a company might consider to support most of XWiki core which consists of quite some extensions and renewing that support date every year sounds like quite some work. Maybe we should ask those who want to indicate the support (XWiki SAS sales/support?) about their opinion.
Proposal 2 : +1, considering the idea of having one page per organization allowing to renew the support of extensions
The idea of doing a distinction between “free / community” support and “paying / professional” support is very interesting IMO. It seems to me that this “free / paid” decision should be made at the plan level, not necessarily at the extension level. The “XWiki Development Team” organization could have a “XWiki Core” plan marked as “free / community support”.
Overall, I think I can see how this would look like on e.x.o., however I’m wondering how the UI could look like when it comes to displaying extension in the EM. In case we have a lot of organization, it could be quite challenging to :
Display support information on each extension in the EM
Display filters to search for extensions that are supported by specific organization.
I guess this is more of a topic to discuss after making these decisions.
Yes, the idea is to define the free/paid support at the support definition level (it wouldn’t make sense at the extension level since all extensions of exo are open source free but their support isn’t necessarily free). It’s a good idea to define it at the plan level rather than at the organization (to allow organizations offering both free and paid support levels depending on the plan).
Yes the UI still needs to be defined for both exo and the EM. The 2 bullet points you listed are what I had in mind too in term of use cases. There are other more subtle use cases but for later (like being notified when the extensions you use have a change in their support definition).
+1 for 1, 2, 3 and 4 with the same notice to have the possibility to review globally (since we have a lot of extensions now)
For the backward compatibility I think we need the possibility to define the plan(s) that will be assigned for the old “recommended” notion (some plans might not cover all the current recommended list).
Hi everyone, here are some mockups to show the supported by tag in the extension manager and the extension page:
In both cases, the idea is to show a tag like button indicating the supporting organizations. Each organization will have its details in a pop-up like windows to be shown on mouse click on desktop or touch interaction on mobile. To get rid of the dialog, the user will have to interact anywhere outside of it (a click, for example).
Inside each dialog there will be a link to the organization, the support plans and a link to each one, as configured in the backend. Each configured plan can have an icon to indicate that it is a paid plan. Currently, I am using a shield icon, meaning that’s something “secure” but not tied directly to monetary spending, but I am open to ideas.
Use on pages:
Extension manager
Extension Page
On the extension page the same concept can be used but positioned inside the metadata block.
Looks good to me (especially in terms of metadata required to be transmitted to EM).
Just not sure about the icon for the paid support, it’s not really a concept I would associate with that shield (feels more like security to me). Not a big fan of the dollar sign either, does not look great IMO in regions where it’s not the currency, so I would prefer a more neutral symbol.
Looks good to me as well. Thanks for working on this.
Regarding the icon, I think we can even do without it (if we don’t find a good one that is).
Are the link to plans and organizations following the color theme? I know they those are still mockup, but I wonder it the link color and backgrounds could be an issue with the color theme.
Thank you for working on this! In general, this looks good. I’m wondering, though, if it isn’t super annoying that you cannot see at a glance the support levels. My understanding was that at least for these cases you show here that there is a hierarchy defined between the support plans and there is always a “minimum” plan. I wonder if we couldn’t have something like [XWiki SAS [Silver 💳] 🔻] that already includes the most important information, in particular the minimum plan, without needing to interact with the supported by tag. The popup could remain the same, adding both all support plans and the link in addition to what’s already in the supported by tag.
Btw., what I noticed today is that we’re also showing the “recommended” badge in the “not installed macros” list in the macro insertion dialog and the quick actions. We also need to decide what we do there, in particular in the quick actions it is impossible to insert all this information.
I am trying to use icons from the icon theme so, our options are relatively small. If we can’t find a suitable one maybe we should go without it, as @mleduc said.
Good catch, no currently they are not, I’ll work on it.
I started working with this in mind, the idea of a popup came from one of these, actually.
As you can see, in my initial mocks, this feature was using a lot of space. But I liked your idea of showing a minimum plan, I will do a quick prototype for this.
Can we insert a link to the extension page? Clearly labeled as an external link, of course.
I did an updated one with the word “paid” indicating the requirement for a particular plan. This has the advantage of being more direct and localizable, however we use more space for it.
I adjusted the colors to follow the theme with the following rules: Popup background: @body-bg Link: @link-color Plan background: the same from alert-info (I didn’t find the LESS variable)
Take a look at the updated proposal below, I tried to make a single entry when that’s the case.
Also, all plan links now show the standard external link icon, to better suit their function.
I’m not a big fan of the new updated images as I find that it makes it more awkward to understand what is displayed (and it forces to decide what is the unfolded one, and unfolding the xwiki.org is not interesting anyway). I feel it’s good enough to display the supporting companies in general. Especially since we said that the extensions LD table would allow filtering by supporting company and plans. And the same should be available in EM (the ability to filter in advanced search)
That would require some more design work, as the current EM UI is not really designed to do filtering on any specific extension metadata right now (all we have is basically the generic search input, which does have a syntax to do advanced filtering, but I doubt that’s what you had in mind).
Add an input box to select a supporting organization
Add an input box to select a support plan for the selected organization (ideally listed only if a supporting org is specified)
Optional:
Add a checkbox to list only free extension
Side note: I’ve never really like the UI for the existing checkboxes and I think we could make it look a bit nicer with @tkrieck 's help. Maybe @tkrieck could also help design some new filtering options for what’s mentioned above?
There are some other changes in this UI, like moving the search button, advanced search popover and including icons on the “Discover and Local” dropdown.
