Mods Site Tour

You’ve been hearing this for months, if not years by now: the new Mods site is coming soon.
That was in fact, always true. However, the person who was working on it had to leave the team last year and left us his work.
Since I offered myself to do the Mods site, I decided to start from scratch and create a plugin instead of a separate website – that would make integration much easier.
I started back in October 2011 and by now the Mods site is almost fully operational – apart from the Plugin Translations feature and a few final touches, everything is done! It has been tested thoroughly by me and the rest of the team and even though it’s not perfect, it does what we wanted to just fine.
Now let’s get to what’s really important: what’s changed? how does it work? what’s new?
The entire Mods site is now based on a single word: collaboration.
You will now be able to have people working on the same project as you, contributing to it, discussing it…in one single place.
Major features:

• Collaboration
• Control Panel
• Builds
• Bug Tracker
• Suggestions

Collaboration
When you create a project (no matter what kind of project is – a plugin, graphic, whatever) you will be considered the author of that project.
As the author, you can invite other people to become collaborators of your project and help you with it – being it as a tester, developer or anything else.

Control Panel
The Control Panel is the place where you can view what’s going on over the projects you work on and of course, manage invitations from other users.
Another feature of the Control Panel is the one that lets you create a project (for obvious reasons, this is the most important one).
When you create a project you are required to submit an initial build and that project will be set for “Awaiting Approval” unless you are considered an “Approved Developer”.
An “Approved Developer” is someone we think has gained enough confidence from us to believe that any project created by that person is safe for the end user.

Builds
Every project is now built around builds. That is, whenever you want to upload a new change you just submit a new build (a ZIP containing the latest data).
That build is automatically considered “dev” and can be downloaded by anyone. When you think you’ve reached a stable status, you can switch (requires approval) to “stable”.
The latest stable build is the one that appears on the download page – don’t worry, you can browse a list of builds and download any.
Builds may only be submitted by the author and its collaborators.



Bug Tracker
Is there a better way to have a stable project than having a bug tracker built-in with the new system? We thought one would be very important and decided to implement it.
You can decide if it’s private (author only) and if collaborators can access it or not or even give access to certain users who are not direct collaborators.
If you don’t agree with us and don’t like bug trackers or have a bug tracker somewhere else, you can even link to that one if you wish and disable the default one.
The way the bug tracker works is similar to the way Redmine works so if you’re used to work with Redmine you will not find strange to work with this one – but of course, don’t expect it to be thaaaaaat powerful, I only have got two hands!


Suggestions
Receiving feedback from users is very important if you want to create amazing software. Because of that, we decided to implement a Suggestions page in which users can give suggestions for your project.
If you don’t like it, feel free to disable it, it’s all up to you!


Other Features
Besides those major features, the Mods site also contains a few others which make it even better:
* Previews – you can now manage your project preview images in a much better way than before.
* Translations – plugin projects are the only ones who have got translations and can be easily managed by collaborators – only they can submit translations.
* Change Log – whenever you submit a new build, you are required to enter a change log. The change log of the project is the combination of every build’s change log.
* Recommended – we got rid of the project ratings. You can recommend projects but not give any rating.
* Statistics – this page shows you relevant information about the most downloaded projects as well as the most recommended ones.
* Mod CP – Projects and Builds can be easily managed from the Mod CP which speeds up the approval process.
* Whenever an update is awaiting approval, users can still download the latest stable (or any other) build without problems.
* If the project hasn’t been updated for more than 6 months, you will see that information when viewing the project page.
* Support – a new link has been added to the project page which links to the Plugin Support forum on the MyBB Community. However, project authors can change that link to their site’s URL if they wish.
* Optionally, users may enter their PayPal email address which will result in a Donate button being shown on the project page.
We hope you are still excited about it. We are too. We really want to push this live as soon as possible but as you know, we all do this on our free time. One thing is certain though: we want to release this at the same time as MyBB 1.8 (or perhaps sooner!).
Thank you!



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