Hi everyone!
Most of us use extensions and to some degree, we use the same extensions - the most popular of them, like srbac, giix, Zend Loader from the YiiExt.
And we all know that sometimes it is hard to chose an extension and it’s not rare that the author has released an extension, made a few bug fix releases and then just disappears for a long time. Many times extensions are too specific and need some love to make them more common (but the functionality and the quality of code is very good usually) - so you take it, fix it, share the changes and nothing happens - author just doesn’t look into comments any more or doesn’t want to update his code for some reason.
And to say the the truth, I like to stick to the extensions and components that have framework developers as contributors or authors - these extensions are usually more generic, more suitable for wider use and are updated timely. And community patches are getting through
So, what I would like to see with Yii 2 is the official repository for extensions, with are developed both by community and the framework developers. This extension/module repository should co-exist with the community extensions (the extensions page we have now), but contain no duplicates in functionality - there should be only one srbac type extension, only one Zend Framework loader, only one Multilingual Active Record implementation and so on. Frankly the best and somewhat seasoned community extensions should migrate there with time.
Second best thing is that people will be sure that the extension will live and it is actually worth patching it and sending them for review and not developing your own extension all over again.
Third good thing is that these extensions/modules can have a package manager in yiic, simplifying installation, updating and management (community modules/extensions can be the part of it two, but that will be the authors responsibility to maintain it in working order).
And last, but not the least - there can be extension developers in Yii team who just deal with extensions/modules and do not interfere with the framework development (we know the Yii devs prefer the quality over the amount of people, so they keep their team small) - these will come from the community. Hell, I could become myself such a person
So, lets discuss it