Plone Software Center is a new product that will allow us to have a centralized database of useful add-on products for Plone. Authors of products will be encouraged to list their products in the plone.org products area.

This is not intended as a replacement for developer-centric systems like Sourceforge or private CVS/SVN repositories — Plone Software Center 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.

The product is also available for downloading for non-plone.org usage. Rather than giving you directions to dig around the Collective for it, you can look for it in the new Plone Software Center.

Plone Software Center has gone through an extensive beta period for developers, but is finally ready for official use.

About the software

Creates a good-looking project area for your product

Example: plone.org products area

This includes:

• Your very own project-centric Plone Help Center for documentation
• Releases and downloads - example: Plone Releases
• Upcoming release planning
• Per-project PLIP-like structure
• Improvement proposals can be assigned to releases to autogenerate roadmaps - example: Plone Roadmap
• Support for externally and locally hosted downloads
• Links to external resources like mailing lists/forums/issue trackers
• Light-weight release process - no external approval needed for a release once the project itself has been approved
• Facilitates the use of local roles to let some people add Improvement Proposals while others manage the releases or documentation

Adding your project to the plone.org products area

To make sure your project is in the products listing on plone.org, please add your project today!

Go to the products area - log in, click the add button and let us know about your project. :)

Any logged-in plone.org Member should be able to add their projects, but they have to be approved initially before they can add releases, downloads or documentation to avoid people misusing the products area as a file storage. The projects will be approved on a regular basis, just like news items and events.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to Plone Software Center (including those who contributed under its old name, ArchPackage): (in alphabetical order) Martin Aspeli, Joel Burton, Christian Heimes, Alexander Limi, Daniel Nouri, Sidnei da Silva, and Dorneles Treméa.

On behalf of the plone.org team,

Joel Burton and Alexander Limi