Updates on the Alfresco Content Services Addon website

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Updates on the Alfresco Content Services Addon website

fcorti
Alfresco Employee
1 15 77.2K

*Update: All Addons can be found here -  

Unfortunately we’ve had to temporarily remove access to addons.alfresco.com - we understand that you may be disappointed, we’re working on bringing it back in a read-only mode whilst we work out what the next steps for the Alfresco AddOns Community.

We’d love to hear more from you on your thoughts on how we can move AddOns forward as we begin planning the next evolution of the Alfresco Community we kindly invite you to contact us with a message. We will do our best to face and solve the issue as soon as possible. We sincerely hope that this won't cause problems to anyone. If it will happen, we apologise in advance.

Update of 7th of June - You can find the draft of the static list at Alfresco Addons *Incomplete list* 

About Alfresco AddOns

If you have ever customised or extended Alfresco Content Services (and/or Alfresco Share), you might have found a website called addons.alfresco.com. Alfresco Add-on website is a large collection of customisations and extensions for the Alfresco platform, contributed by the company's global developer community. The Alfresco Add-on website was designed to be a one-stop shop for Alfresco users looking to extend the functionality of Alfresco with pre-built modules.

The Alfresco Add-on website has been active since 2012 and since the beginning it grew rapidly, hosting several hundreds of different projects: Open Source and Proprietary, developed by Alfresco official partners or Community enthusiasts, supported or "given as is" in terms of production readiness. From this point of view, the initiative has been a success and a positive achievement of the entire Alfresco ecosystem (Alfresco as a Company, partners, customers, users, enthusiasts, etc.).

Most of the Alfresco enthusiasts agree that a sort of "Alfresco Marketplace" would be something useful for everyone, even if some concerns were around since a long time about the (proven) level of maturity of the (oldest) releases of the projects with the newest versions of Alfresco Content Services (and Alfresco Share). In addition to that, an improved experience in searching and installing the add-ons were something suggested, but never discussed and defined with enough details.

Today the GDPR is forcing us to the decision to put the Alfresco Add-on website in stand-by mode, until its future version will be defined and re-launched again. Looking forward to start the discussion around the next version of the Alfresco Marketplace, Add-on mechanism or whatever it will be.

15 Comments
villdre
Active Member II

Sorry to see the Addons website go! It would be good to have a replacement, as we at EisenVault have a couple of interesting initiatives in place, which we were planning to release as open source on the addons website.

afaust
Master

Given how all the existing addons go against the new Alfresco maxim of "out-of-process" extensions and ADF/ACA has yet to provide any plug-in extensibility support, I wonder if there are even any "next steps" to consider after bringing back the Addons site in read-only mode. There will be no more "addons" in the new world - only isolated, little solutions / apps that just happen to share the same content services backend. WIth regards to ADF components, a listing separate from NPM will likely not be maintained by today's breed of (web) developers, not to mention that Enterprise partners / customers rarely (if ever) publish their solutions / components. And since there are no technical frameworks / baselines for out-of-process extensions other than "should use ReST API", they will vastly differ in underlying technology, level of quality, deployment model and usefulness for other members of the community. And I doubt Alfresco is prepared to setup some kind of vetting / certification process (with / without involvement of community members).

TL;DR - a new addons platform may be wasted effort before future / vision of an addons ecosystem as a whole has been defined and outlined

loftux
Partner

Hi,

I'm really interested to learn what exactly in GDPR forces you to close the addons site?

Removing this when there is no alternative is a bad choice, adding back a read-only version maybe even worse (how then can I deal with my data)?

jservajean
Active Member

This is very likely to discourage any community/third parties contributions.

The GDPR "official reason" seems very doubtfull to me too. At least provide a list of existing add-ons with the author's website link.

yonathanbarn
Active Member

¿Qué podemos hacer mientras? Estaba en pleno deseo de personalizar mi Alfresco con addons, ¿y ahora? ¿es en serio? Smiley Sad ...

douglascrp
Advanced II
fcorti
Alfresco Employee

A similar list (static) will come soon on the "old" addons.alfresco.com website, but Douglas's suggestion is definitely a possible alternative.

jpotts
Professional

How long will this be completely unavailable? Couldn't you at least dump the list and produce a static page? It's just a Drupal site. Should be easy to dump. Also, +1 to Peter's comment about wanting to understand the specific GDPR concern here.

kgastaldo
Senior Member

Hi All - Ian Norton‌ has posted a blog to address some of the questions here: https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2018/05/29/why-we-took-addons-down 

I'll be creating a doc in Jive with all the links from the AddOns site within the next day or so.

inorton
Active Member II

Hey Peter,

We did an extensive audit of our sites ahead of GDPR and during this we found there were were some serious problems with the AddOns site security, the AddOns site stores personally identifiable information and with GDPR looming to took the difficult decision to take the site offline.

I've written a blog post here for more details: https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2018/05/29/why-we-took-addons-down

alfresco
Alfresco Employee

It took much longer than " the next day or so" - but all of the Addons are now in Jive. I'll be updating the page and bringing back some of the lists we had on the Addons page (newest, most popular, etc), but for now - all Addons are here: Alfresco Addons

Sorry for the delay!

ainsof
Active Member II

Excellent work. Maybe we can update the post to have the updated link at the bottom instead of scrolling to the end of the page.

kgastaldo
Senior Member

Will do!

ainsof
Active Member II

Thnx for adding the link to the top of the blog.

I found the old site in a google search and forgot how to get to the updated site. I wonder if we can also update the old site (https://addons.alfresco.com/ ) to link users to the updated one Alfresco Addons 

kgastaldo
Senior Member

We've got a ticket in with IT to do a redirect, so it's on the to-do list!