Quite some time back I had created a version of ColorfulTabs for Flock and uploaded to extensions.flock.com. I haven’t been able to get it to go public till today. But something out of the blue happened today. All the developers have received a mail from Flock Administration that they are taking down the extension hosting from extensions.flock.com. I’ve been thinking of starting an extension repository to distribute unmaintained extensions. May be we can bump them to get them fixed for Firefox 3. And may be we can also accept new extensions from developers who are finding it hard to get their extension public on AMO. It’s another sad story. Please do let me know your thoughts about it. Anyways, here is the complete communication.
We’re always trying to make the Flock machine as tight and efficient as possible. We’re a small company, but we work hard to provide a product that is both innovative and high quality. Unfortunately, our resources are limited and we can’t do everything we’d like. When this affects the quality of the Flock experience, it’s time for us to make the hard decisions.
Extensions.flock.com has had a bumpy history. There’s a fundamental issue here: there are very few Flock-specific extensions, and a great many Firefox extensions that are already hosted on addons.mozilla.org. The architecture behind extensions.flock.com is not mature, and we have historically been unable to devote valuable developer resources to this. It’s unrealistic (and doesn’t make a lot of sense) to try to create our own system on the level of addons.mozilla.org until we have more Flock-specific extensions. Our admiration for the work Mozilla has done extends to addons.mozilla.org…AMO really is the best experience for getting extensions.
With that in mind, we have cut the fat that is our unwieldy extensions system. We have removed all extensions that are not Flock-specific (i.e.: designed to integrate with Flock’s unique features), unless we have some sort of partnership or agreement (if you’re interested in this, please let me know). We’ve removed the Drupal back-end from extensions.flock.com, which means no comments or ratings on the posts, and no automatic submission system. New submissions and updates can be emailed to extension-submission at flock dot com. Visitors to extensions.flock.com will be encouraged to visit AMO for more extensions.
These changes will allow us to continue hosting relevant extensions and start hosting themes for the first time (very exciting!) while keeping the amount of maintenance and administration for this section to a minimum.
Our intent and hope for the future of this part of flock.com is to build a quality back-end that allows for more security, automatic updating, and a better submission system. The timeline for this is unknown currently, but it is on our projects list.
I apologize to those who have spent the time dealing with the current (frustrating) system to get your extensions online, just to see them removed. We immensely appreciate your love and support for Flock, and hope you continue to make your extensions Flock-compatible so our rapidly growing community can keep using your great creations.
I’d like to look at this as a great opportunity for this Flock developer community to delve into our developer documentation at http://developer.flock.com and start making some Flock-specific extensions. As Tony Farndon demonstrated so well with BlogPlus (http://flock.spatialviews.com/blogplus_features.html), there are many opportunities to improve upon Flock’s unique features to create even more amazing tools.
Flock Inc’s developers are always happy to answer questions, and can often be found on the #flock-dev channel of irc.flock.com. And, of course, you can join our developers mailing list, which features both Flock Inc developers and a number of community developers. The mailing list is at: https://lists.flock.com/mailman/listinfo/flock-dev
Please feel free to contact me if you have any thoughts about this change to extensions.flock.com. Your feedback is always really helpful and appreciated.
Thank you for your love and contributions.
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