Samples to Contributions

Just made the upgrade to 1.3 and I am glad to see the contributions are back up - I'm always amazed at the talent that goes into creating these mods. One wish I have as I read through the contributions is that the authors would post a link to a page or site featuring the mod (if applicable). It would save me the time of downloading the files, just to see that they aren't what I thought they were.
Thanks to all!

John MacDougall

I agree with this wholeheartedly. This is a definite MUST as it becomes really troublesome downloading files just to see what is in them... And the hassle will increase as more and more contributions are added.

I think that the contributions sample pictures could be hosted on the Zen-Cart site itself along with the discription.

At the very least there should be a small clickable version where one can immediately see what the contribution contains... Then without clicking and opening a new window one can immediately know what the contribution is about...

That would be so kool!

Will the upload moderator allow links to supporting sites?

I think providing a link in the contribution description is a reasonable compromise. The mods don't want to point to a completely offiste hosted contribution (b/c then there would be no quality control of the content of the mods) but pointing to a help page seems like a workable solution. What's attractive to me about help pages maintained on my site is that I can update them as questions come in. I got a BUNCH of questions about my last mod that I didn't expect at all, and I answered them on the forum support thread and my support page as they came in. Obviously the readme I've bundled in to the contrib is static until my next release.

Failing this, you can always announce an external FAQ type page on the support thread for the contrib. Here's my FAQ for Quantity Discounts:
http://www.thatsoftwareguy.com/zencart_quantity_discounts.html

I would be interested to see what others are doing.

Good luck to all,
Scott

The problem with this idea is maintaining a site that holds the given add-on ...

Putting all add-ons in one site does not show off the feature of a single add-on ...

Putting them on separate shops takes up a lot of resources and is not ideal either ... :cry:

Setting up your own test site with a test database and installing the add-on is really the best solution ...

The "3rd-Party Contributions" area on the wiki was created for the purpose of updating documentation on-demand. If you post an article, you can edit it.
http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.php/3rd_party_contributions

The support forum is ideal for ongoing active discussion of real-time problems and/or for collaboration to come to a resolution on an issue.