A quick update.
Back in August we promised a 5.7.0 release on September 12th with a follow up on September 30th. We've managed to bang out three follow up releases with various bug fixes, and are now hunkered down on some deeper ecosystem improvements that will launch next week. Here's some details on what we're doing:
- The marketplace pages will get a new simpler unified support. Instead of the three different ways to contact a developer today (support, pre-sales questions, and discussion forums) we will have one simple "Get Help" button on every marketplace listing page. Click it and we'll ask you to qualify what you're posting. If you've bought an add-on/theme and assigned it to a project in the last 30 days you'll be able to open a priority support ticket. Otherwise it is a general question, but they all go into the same list so we're expecting it to be a little easier on everyone to keep up to date.
- There will be upgrades, both paid and free. It's now up to 3rd party developers to decide if an update to their add-on/theme should be free to everyone whose bought it over the last 6 years or if there should be a discounted upgrade fee for folks who have bought an earlier version.
- Project pages are less important. We're making it easier to add licenses from different accounts with the hope that there will be less confusion about reconnecting sites to the community.
- The marketplace is being redesigned (for 5.7) to present more meaningful content more quickly, and the %#!@#% infinite scroll is out the window for a more traditional paging interface.
- A new instant setup system will make it easier for new folks coming to concrete5.org to quickly get a site up and running instead of having to jump through all the hoops they do today.
I've attached some screenshots for some of this stuff for clarity.