21 August 2008

by Johan

Developing DOCman addons

It never ceases to amaze me: DOCman has crossed 700.000 downloads (since March 2007, not counting alternative download locations). That makes it one of the most popular Joomla extensions out there. Because it’s so widespread, recently a lot of new third party DOCman addons have popped up. They even have their own category in the Joomla extensions directory. If you’ve developed one of these, or you’re planning on releasing a DOCman addon, rest assured: we’re totally cool with that. In fact, we highly encourage everyone to release their extensions to the community!

All we ask is that you play by the rules. It’s actually very simple: Your addons must be released under the GPL license. Joomla and DOCman are available to you for free, and are created by members of the community, so it’s only fair for extensions developers to adhere to the licenses for these applications. (This doesn’t mean you can’t charge for your extension; the GPL clearly allows that.)

Invitation

I know from personal experience that for a couple of small addons, it’s not worth the trouble of maintaining a public forum. That’s why I closed down the old MjazTools forum and told my users to go to “3PD addons” category at the Joomlatools forum instead.

I’d like to invite all developers to do the same. Send users with questions about your extension to the forum here, and, more importantly, drop in every now then to answer those questions. Please be aware that all support and moderation on our forums is done by volunteers from the community. We can’t ask them to get to know each extension out there. A community forum only works when everybody tries to help out other people, as a favour to those that helped you.

  • http://www.lithuanianjoomla.com Algis

    Do you plan to release stable j1.5 native DOCman version? if yes – when?

  • kitecom

    Does that mean no?

  • http://mathiasverraes.com Mathias Verraes

    Hehe, that doesn’t mean anything :-) We’re just very (and I mean very very!) busy building the next internal milestone release of Nooku. We’ll make an announcement on the future of DOCman soon. Don’t worry, DOCman is not dead — it’s not even sleeping, just taking a quick nap.

  • Guest

    it is ? – forum activity suggests otherwise :P

  • http://mathiasverraes.com Mathias Verraes

    Lol, absolutely right x-ception! Only DOCman _development_ is taking a break, the project itself is still the most downloaded extension on joomlacode

  • NickWilson

    Don’t want to ask a ‘boring’ question, but does the development team have an idea when DOCman might awake from that snooze ?

    The possibilities, and therefore development potential, for Nooku seem brilliant but near infinite. How long will translation nirvana hold these brilliant programmers in it’s sway :o)

    DOCman itself ? What can I say … great / fantastic … but improvemts could certainly creep in. Native v1.5 support and actual directory structures for the files that mimic the front end (for those of us who have big repositories !)

    Thanks for all the hard work !

  • http://novablog.co.cc/ Nova

    Not sure, you should wait for comfirmation from admin. :)

  • http://johan.janssens.me Johan Janssens

    Yes we do and very soon ! For more info please see : http://blog.joomlatools.eu/2009/11/docman-15-rc2-and-new-surprise.html

  • Ryan

    Its cool to look back on this post and read about the DOCman addons when they first were coming out. It’s amazing how far we have came in regards to design and support and how the community has influenced these extensions. If I was to go back I would get a cash advance online and invest some more time and energy into extensions and making them into a profitable business.

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