Revision as of 10:49, 30 January 2009

EPIC Modernization Requirements Document V 0.1

The Eclipse Plugin Central (EPIC) is a popular and successful resource for the Eclipse community. It lists over 1100 Eclipse based products and drives thousands of click-thrus per month to some of the top rated products. Unfortunately, EPIC is hosted on an older content management system (CMS), so it is difficult to maintain and update. Therefore, we are starting a project to modernize EPIC and re-host it on a more modern updated CMS.

This document is to capture and prioritize all of the requirements for a new EPIC. The goal is to finalize the requirement by the end of March and begin implementation shortly thereafter.

Below is a draft version of the document. We encourage people to submit their suggestions for this bugzilla entry. We will update the document based on the input from many sources.

Goals

• Dramatically increase the usability of through improved navigation and graphic design.
• Make it easier for solution providers to manage their product entries.
• Provide better linkage between EPIC site and the vendors’ update sites.
• Host EPIC on a new content management system.

Requirements

Usability and Navigation

• Need the ability to tag products and navigate via a tag cloud.
• Products should be able to have multiple tags and product owners should be able to select and define tags for their products.
• A product needs to be able to be in multiple categories. Currently a product can only be in one category
• For plugins that have not been updated for a long time, we need to show that the information might be old and out of date.
• Allow cross linking to other similar products by the same vendor and/or category
• Allow cross linking to Eclipse Live content

Management and Administration

• Remove the moderation queue for plugin / service listing updates.
• Host the click thru reports for member plugins on EPIC itself allowing for realtime data.
• Allow plugins to upload their plugin image icons directly to the server.

Social Networking Ideas

• We should allow a product to be voted up or down, similar to digg. Remove the vote 1-10 system in place now. Need to allow people to add a 'vote' graphic onto their site. We could introduce aging of votes, so votes expire after ### days or categorize the votes by time to provide rankings for "this week"/"this month"/"this year" similar to the way YouTube and others social sites do.
• Need to maintain the RSS feeds for new and updated products
• Allow users to specify their favourite products and then produce an RSS feed that shows them any changes for that plugin.
• Be able to show the list of most 'favourite products' across all users

Update Sites

• Need to integrate p2 update sites for the product listings.
• Can a list of favorite products be used to aggregate the relevant update sites for an individual

CMS Issues

• Current thinking is to host EPIC and Live on a single shared Drupal install.
• We should integrate sign-on with existing Buzilla accounts
• The current install of PostNuke places a large load on the database. We should be sending SELECT queries to the slave and INSERT/UPDATE queries to the master.

Support for Training and Service Providers

• Need to be able to search/tag by geography and expertise
• Training calendar for Eclipse public courses

Migration Requirements

• Plugin information should be migrated to new EPIC without requiring intervention from plugin owner.
• Username and password information should be migrated to the new site. We should try to delete any usernames that aren't being used.

Naming

• We should consider referring to 'products' or 'projects' and not plugins, since a lot of the solutions listed on EPIC are not actual plugins.
• Should we rename Eclipse Plugin Central to something more generic; maybe Eclipse Solution Center?

Other Ideas

• I think it would be interesting to show what Eclipse projects are used in the different products.
• Should Eclipse Live and EPIC be merged into a single entity?