Clean up the Classes and encourage updates...

I would like to see an improvement in the Classes on this site. Too many classes are weak, incomplete, have poor documentation or otherwise.

Lets have everyone contribute more information, and purge or shun classes that are considered outdated or depreciated or just plain not very good.

Take for example several Authorize.net classes, some of them haven't been updated in 3 or more years. Also some of them don't implement the whole API, they only implement Simple Integration Method, not Advanced Integration method, but the documentation isn't clear enough in some cases to find that out, so you have to download a package look at it, and then realize this isn't what you want.

Better categorization of classes might help here. Also comments posted by users that say, this is missing or that is missing would be nice.

Another thing that would be cool, is if classes more then 5 years old, without updates just wouldn't show in the Search results. Maybe allow it advanced search.

Allow a thumbsup/thumbs down policy on classes, with enough people liking or disliking a particular class we could then sort by the popular classes.

I just run into to many classes that are sub-par, it would be good maybe to qualify a subset of classes as professional,intermediate or hobbyist then have search based on the type of class one is looking for.

Another thing you might consider is allowing a group of individuals take over a class, have multiple people contribute to the classes, that might provide a more active community if people decided to help each other.

You can help by rating the packages that you try. That way other users may see how a package is rated and avoid using deficient packages preferring better rated ones.

Better rated packages are listed first in the top rated packages pages that exist for each category, as well on the pages of related top rated packages.

Also, when rating the packages, you can also post comments that may be either sent by e-mail to the author or posted in the respective package forums, so other users can read what you commented.

The site should not delist any package because it may be too cruel for some authors. The site cannot also take packages out of the search results because the site search for regular users is powered by Google and there is no control over results sorting.

The site cannot also take the ownership of a package from an user. But if the user allows it, it may be possible to transfer ownership. I just wonder if is there enough demand for anything like that, to justify implementing such feature.

As for packages not being updated by some authors, the problem is that some packages have many files and updating them is a very tedious using the current user interface.

In the future it will be possible for the authors to update a package from a remote CVS, SVN, or GIT repository.

That is something that is on the to do list for a while. There are other important things being developed on the site now, so it may only be possible to implement such feature next year.

Better categorization is also on the to do list for a while. When its time, it will very likely be a cooperative effort by which any user may propose new sub-categories for each package.

Anyway, thank you for the suggestions. Feel free to keep commenting or proposing more ideas.