Idea for marketplace: add-on sandbox for customer testing
Permalink
I've been following the ""Release from Project" button..." thread and a few things caught my attention. One thing in particular was the limited ability to evaluate an add-on before purchase. With a fraction of developers providing working demos, this often leads to purchases based on the add-on description and screenshots only.
"Another problem I have found is the number of broken links to demos of the add ons, very frustrating and difficult to fully assess if the addon is going to be useful."
http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/chat/release-from-project...
With most software, you have the ability to download a trial version (limited by features or by trial period). Offering trial downloads for add-ons would be a huge amount of work to implement properly and even more work to reasonably prevent add-on code from being stolen.
I came up with another potential option that would be as useful as a trial, would secure add-on code, and less work to maintain and setup.
The idea is a concrete5 testing sandbox environment for evaluating add-ons. This would give customers full ability to try out an add-on before purchase.
- the concrete5 testing sandbox would include a full version of concrete5 in a virtual machine
- includes a list of all available add-ons in the marketplace
- multiple add-ons can be installed at the same time during a session to check their compatibility and potential conflicts with other add-ons
- for safety, ports could be limited/emulated and outgoing data could be captured for presentation (i.e. someone is testing an add-on with mail sending features and would see a copy of the sent mail)
Potential benefits:
- ability to limit pre-sales questions
- increase sales by allowing customers to use a block to see if it suits their needs (using an add-on before purchase gives a customer more confidence to purchase and more confidence that they made the right purchase)
- ability to limit post-sales questions and support
"Another problem I have found is the number of broken links to demos of the add ons, very frustrating and difficult to fully assess if the addon is going to be useful."
http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/chat/release-from-project...
With most software, you have the ability to download a trial version (limited by features or by trial period). Offering trial downloads for add-ons would be a huge amount of work to implement properly and even more work to reasonably prevent add-on code from being stolen.
I came up with another potential option that would be as useful as a trial, would secure add-on code, and less work to maintain and setup.
The idea is a concrete5 testing sandbox environment for evaluating add-ons. This would give customers full ability to try out an add-on before purchase.
- the concrete5 testing sandbox would include a full version of concrete5 in a virtual machine
- includes a list of all available add-ons in the marketplace
- multiple add-ons can be installed at the same time during a session to check their compatibility and potential conflicts with other add-ons
- for safety, ports could be limited/emulated and outgoing data could be captured for presentation (i.e. someone is testing an add-on with mail sending features and would see a copy of the sent mail)
Potential benefits:
- ability to limit pre-sales questions
- increase sales by allowing customers to use a block to see if it suits their needs (using an add-on before purchase gives a customer more confidence to purchase and more confidence that they made the right purchase)
- ability to limit post-sales questions and support
Drupal has a really great testing tool exactly for this purpose:
http://simplytest.me/
It's pretty great since it always launches a fresh installation for each tester, so you never end up using the same environment with other testers, as is the case with many of the demo environments you see in the c5 marketplace.
It's provided by a third party, not by the organization behind Drupal itself.
Maintaining that, of course, costs money and that project seems to have sponsors behind it to make it possible.
This has been discussed in the past several times and the general opinion from the core team seems to be that the developers should provide the testing environment themselves. Making such testing environment and making sure it is constantly up-to-date takes time and therefore money, because of which you don't see it that often with 3rd party developers. However, I also think that it is quite necessary for some add-ons but not for all. It's clearly a marketing tool for the developers, so at the end of the day, it is really the developer's responsibility to pay the bill on that.
Our add-ons that do not have the demo available is simply because we're a small organization and maintaining it would take more time than it would bring us in revenue. For some add-ons, we've provided the demo where we felt that it is useful.
http://simplytest.me/
It's pretty great since it always launches a fresh installation for each tester, so you never end up using the same environment with other testers, as is the case with many of the demo environments you see in the c5 marketplace.
It's provided by a third party, not by the organization behind Drupal itself.
Maintaining that, of course, costs money and that project seems to have sponsors behind it to make it possible.
This has been discussed in the past several times and the general opinion from the core team seems to be that the developers should provide the testing environment themselves. Making such testing environment and making sure it is constantly up-to-date takes time and therefore money, because of which you don't see it that often with 3rd party developers. However, I also think that it is quite necessary for some add-ons but not for all. It's clearly a marketing tool for the developers, so at the end of the day, it is really the developer's responsibility to pay the bill on that.
Our add-ons that do not have the demo available is simply because we're a small organization and maintaining it would take more time than it would bring us in revenue. For some add-ons, we've provided the demo where we felt that it is useful.
I doubt if the core team can spare the time to do something like this. Look at how many other things they have to do and not enough time to do them and I just don't see there ever being resources to spare.
However, if a community member was motivated to create and host such a sandbox, then addon and theme developers could donate a licence of their products to the sandbox project. I would certainly donate licenses to my addons and link from my marketplace pages.
The sandbox would need to start with nothing installed and list every license available for install, so users could install just what they are interested in. Doing it the other way round with everything already installed would be unusable.
The sandbox would also need to block any downloads pretty thoroughly. For example, suppose someone sandboxed Backup Voodoo. They could then backup all the addons available to the sandbox and download the lot.
A more secure version of such a sandbox environment could also be useful for the PRB if it had access to review submissions as well as live addons. It would simplify the review process and possibly speed up the overall process. However, implementing that would require some work from the core team to make submissions available.
However, if a community member was motivated to create and host such a sandbox, then addon and theme developers could donate a licence of their products to the sandbox project. I would certainly donate licenses to my addons and link from my marketplace pages.
The sandbox would need to start with nothing installed and list every license available for install, so users could install just what they are interested in. Doing it the other way round with everything already installed would be unusable.
The sandbox would also need to block any downloads pretty thoroughly. For example, suppose someone sandboxed Backup Voodoo. They could then backup all the addons available to the sandbox and download the lot.
A more secure version of such a sandbox environment could also be useful for the PRB if it had access to review submissions as well as live addons. It would simplify the review process and possibly speed up the overall process. However, implementing that would require some work from the core team to make submissions available.
Quite often I've had to purchase add-ons that I subsequently haven't used but had to 'take a punt' on because of lack of info.
The ability to test add-ons prior to purchase would really help IMO.
How could we go about getting this done - and what do add-on developers think about it?