The Plone Products Area is a centralized database of useful add-on products for Plone. Authors of products are encouraged to list their products here.

This is not intended as a replacement for developer-centric systems like SourceForge or private CVS/SVN repositories — Plone Software Center (the software used to power the Products area) doesn't require any changes in how you manage your software products. It's primary goal is to make it easy for the community to understand what products are available, for integrators to find products, and for evaluators to understand the depth and breadth of our offerings.

In return for your listing your project here, we'll be able to drive users to your project, get new-release information listed on plone.org, and (if you put your release files here), take some of the burden of your server for people downloading files. This will make it easier to for you to list your project in places like Freshmeat and Python-specific repositories.

When you add your project to the Products area, you'll have the option of keeping the following information in it:

• information on particular releases (version 1.1, 1.2, etc.)
• files associated with those releases
• a documentation center (powered by PloneHelpCenter). This grants you the following categoration options:
  • FAQs
  • HOWTOs
  • Tutorials
  • Glossaries
  • Movies
  • Reference Manuals
  • Error References

  Of course, most projects won't need all these documentation types, but they are individually selectable, and you can add new types as needed.

• Improvement Proposal documents (Plone PLIPs and Python PEPs are good examples of this) that will give you automatic roadmap generation like the Plone Roadmap.
• an issue tracker, powered by Poi - see Poi's own tracker as an example.

In the future, we're likely to add:

• Mailing list / forum integration
• Version control integration/browsing

You don't have to use all of these things — if you have your own documentation section, or prefer to keep docs in your product, you can still use PSC. Even if you want to actually have the releases on your site, that's fine, too — just getting the top-level project description into our system will help immeasurably with our primary use cases of people needing to understand what products are available.

We understand that many of us prefer to keep our canonical information on other sites — Zope.org, SourceForge, a company site, etc. That's fine — we have fields for giving the canonical location of the project, while still being able to provide enough description and categorization to be useful.

If you're a software author and considering not listing your project here, or would prefer that your project not be listed here, please take a moment and let us know why (mail the Plone Website list). We want to make sure that we build something that is helpful and lightweight enough to be attractive to everyone, and think there are huge wins if we can all use it. Your feedback about what doesn't work about this is very very important.

Plone Software Center is the effort of many people (some of whom contributed when it was called ArchPackage). In alphabetical order: Alexander Limi, Christian Tiran Heimes, Daniel Nouri, Dorneles deo Treméa, Joel Burton, Martin optilude Aspeli and Sidnei dreamcatcher da Silva. Thanks to all of them.