Since the thirty bees store has launched anyone can sign up and add their free modules to the store. We expect over the next few months our store will become an amazing place for our community to find the modules that they need to run their shops. If you are a developer that likes open source, this article is for you. It goes step by step with how to list your free modules in our store.
The Requirements
The requirements for listing free modules in our store is simple, they need to have a GitHub repo and correct formatting of the module. This opens up our store to anyone that wants to add a free module, whether you are a developer or a paid service looking to expand your reach. Now you can list your modules quickly and easily on our store and manage them directly from GitHub.
What do we mean mange from GitHub?
We are a very small and focused team, we understand that time is limited and doing the same task repetitively kills time management. There are two reasons we have set our store up to work with GitHub, the first is to promote open source, the second is to add in automation. In the past with other marketplaces to make a change to a modules marketing information you have to log into the marketplace, then make the changes and save. You might keep a local copy for your records so you can tweak them as needed in the future as well. With our marketplace we have changed that. All of the marketing material and information is directly in the GitHub repository. Once you make a change in the repository, the change is automatically updated in the thirty bees marketplace. You can change the supported PHP version, a description, fix a typo, add a new release, change the cover image for the module. All of those changes are automatically sent to the store in seconds using webhooks. This keeps you as a developer from having to worry about making the changes two places.
This also allows for one other important addition as well. If a community member finds a bug in your free module, they can easily contribute a fix without bothering you. This helps to create a more stable and transparent ecosphere of module development and this is something we are very much concerned about at thirty bees.
I don’t use GitHub
If you don’t use GitHub, it might be time to consider it. It is a very power solution for automating workflows and sharing your code with your whole team. That is not even mentioning the version control capabilities, which is the main purpose for using GitHub. If you haven’t used GitHub before they have some awesome tutorials. You can find them here. If you are not very familiar with using the command line for your work process, never fear, most of our developers use a product called GitKraken. It allows us to manage our GitHub repositories easily and quickly. It will also speed up your workflow as well.
How to list your modules
We have made a guide in our documentation to give you all the information that you need to list your modules on the store. You can read the guide here. If you have any questions about free modules, how to list them or how to use GitHub, we have a dedicated forum on our community forum just for that. You can view the community repository here. Let us know if you see any modules that should be forked, or if you want to donate any modules to the community repository.
