Improve information about the level of support of extensions

Hi devs,

Right now on e.x.o and in the EM, we have the concept of “Recommended” and the concept of “Developed by”. However there’s no concept of who are the individuals, groups or companies offering support for these extensions.

It would benefit our users to know what options of support they have for various extensions.

I’m thus proposing the following:

• We introduce the concept of “Supported by” in both the Repository Application and in the Extension Manager. The idea is that:
  • “Recommended” becomes a criteria of current quality (note that the name “Recommended” is not the best since I’m not sure it’s a good thing to recommend an extension that is not supported for example)
  • “Supported by” is a criteria of commitment, i.e that the extension will get better and that there’s a way to ask questions and get answers
  • Note: We could also imagine dropping “Recommended” and only having “Supported by” and then say that the current recommended would become: “having at least one ‘supported by’ entry”. However:
    • It’s harder to implement and we will still need to support “Recommended” for backward compat reasons (existing XWiki instances will ask to return recommended info from e.x.o)
    • We wouldn’t be able to express that an extension is of a current good quality, if there’s nobody supporting it (edge case probably)
    • We wouldn’t be able to indicate that an extension is supported by someone while not currently bering of a good quality (edge case probably)
  • WDYT? Should we drop “Recommended” and have only “Supported by”?
• We allow sponsoring companies to edit this field on e.x.o to add the following information:
  • Name of the company (string), e.g. XWiki SAS
  • Support plan name (string), e.g. Silver level
  • Support plan URL (url), e.g. https://xwiki.com/...
  • Support plan level (integer), e.g. 1
  • Notes
    • The best exact format is to be discussed, this is just a first thought.
    • The level is needed to be able to query extensions to answer the question, e.g. “list all extensions supported by XWiki SAS, in their silver plan or above”
    • We may want to avoid duplication and enter the company name, and plan name + level in a single place, and then in extension metadata, only use ids.
• Have a column in exo to allow filtering by “supported by” and “at least a given support level”(at least be able to query for all extensions above a given level of support)
• EM should display that information when displaying extensions and should also allow filtering by “supported by” (and above a certain level of support)
• We allow a sponsoring company to add one or more such entries for each extension (in case they provide several support plans for an extension).
• (if we keep recommended) We update the definition of recommended to remove the supported part from it and keep only the quality level.

WDYT?

Thanks

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