The Future Of Magento Connect

As I mentioned in my previous post, several announcements were made during Mage::Camp about up and coming changes to Magento Connect; most noteworthy (from a developer’s standpoint) is the development of commercial licensing, encoding and payment handling.

Upon the release of Magento Connect 2.0 developers uploading their Magento extensions will benefit from the option of added security of optional encryption of source code. Due to the popularity and as yet impenetrable encryption, IonCube is almost certain to be the encoder of choice for commercial Magento Connect extensions. This new version will also include integrated licensing management and payment services, all of which will attract a small charge.

However, I feel the most significant development with Magento Connect 2.0, particularly from a community point of view, is the proposed new Quality Assurance (QA) system that will allow developers to have their extensions assessed and verified by a developer at Varien. This will provide users will a vital tool - helping them to distinguish the ‘gold’ from the ‘chaff’ and hopefully giving end users additional reassurance when purchasing commercial extensions.