As many extension developers have noticed, there has been a long (approx. 5 week) backlog of submitted extensions that require attention from the JED curators. Like the developers who submit these extensions, real life can get in the way of our JED activities and this was indeed the cause of the backlog. For example, one of our most productive curators also had a serious accident and broke his wrist/hand, preventing computer work of any kind.

To address the backlog, the JED team held an extension squash session on Wednesday (2009.05.20) and worked chronologically through all the extensions submitted before May 14. Great job team!

We are committed to maintaining the JED as a valuable, up-to-date resource and have made tentative plans to hold these squash session more often so these backlogs are less common.

While developers are naturally satisfied that their extensions are now published, the length of the list of newly published extensions has left some extension developers disappointed and frustrated that their newly-approved submissions never remained on the “New Extensions” page of the JED.

To give some background, the New Extensions page is a list of the 100 most-recently approved extensions. Typically, new extensions will receive some early traffic, as they are listed on the top of this page for a day or two.

To partially address the potential loss of traffic resulting from the publication of many extensions at once, we have temporarily increased the length of the new extensions list such that 200 extensions are now displayed. In addition, we are currently discussing if changes on the JED home page could improve visibility for both new and existing extensions. If you have suggestions on this topic, please post them below in the comments.

However, this situation highlights a larger principle: developers who want (or need) popular extensions should not be relying on the JED as their only source of traffic.

Advertising is critical for the success of any Joomla! extension. In addition, updating your extension regularly is a good way to gain trust from your users, and get some exposure on the Recently Updated extensions list. I could go on and on about affiliate networks, cross-promotions with other developers, Google Ads, etc ... but the fact is that producing a popular, successful extension will take a coordinated, multi-pronged and long-lasting approach by the stakeholders.

A day or two on the new extension page is really a small factor in the grand scheme of things.

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The author joined the JED team in December, 2008 and currently has 4 JED listing.