Adding 3rd party App Stores to OpenChurch - an introduction

Several people have expressed interest in contributing back to the OpenChurch project.
The great news is that now with Apps, there is a functional way for 3rd parties to add their own modules/apps to OpenChurch as a way to extend functionality without baking everything into the core project.

See App Store screenshot: https://twitter.com/#!/drupalninja/status/184011723102101504/photo/1/large

Now I must first preface this discussion with the disclaimer that this is for experienced module developers. There are certainly other places for less experienced Drupallers to contribute in the OpenChurch issue queue, like finding bugs, reporting them, helping troubleshoot problems, etc..

But for those like OpenParish and others that want to extend OpenChurch with their own modules, apps is the way to go.

Rather than adding all 3rd party apps into 1 App store, I would rather reserve the main OpenChurch App Store for modules and features that are supported with the OpenChurch core project. For 3rd party apps I would rather the contributor add their own project to Drupal.org with the hook_appstore_stores_info() added to their module.

What that does is add a new App store to the main Apps administration page at /admin/apps. And so underneath 'OpenChurch Apps' it would say 'MyOrg Apps' or whatever the name of your App store is.

Your App store would then reference features, contrib dependencies, etc. that are downloadables that the end user could install from the App store. This is great because the apps are basically, 'on demand'.

As the OpenChurch maintainer I have the option of adding the lightweight App store module to core and enable it by default. For me to want to do that there are a couple of requirements.

Requirements for OpenChurch inclusion

1. The App store module be hosted on Drupal.org so that I can route issues to the appropriate project when people submit bugs.
2. Some idea that the App store is being supported and maintained. If you just want to advertise your store as development/experimental that is fine, I might reference it from the project page but I wouldn't want to package the store module with core itself.
3. The App module itself shouldn't include really any code other than a module with the app store hook in it. If you would like to have all of your custom modules in 1 app store project that is fine, but we wouldn't package it with OC as it would bloat the core project.
4. The App module apps shouldn't have too many 3rd party dependencies. If the App has a lot of dependencies, incompatibility becomes much more of an issue and so it is more appropriate to reference the App store from the project page as opposed to packaging it with OC core.

There are caveats with adding an App Store that is 'dependent' on the OpenChurch project. The challenge is that from time to time OpenChurch releases could include changes that make a 3rd party App 'incompatible'. And so the maintainer has to keep track of OpenChurch progress to see what kinds of changes are (or aren't) affecting their 3rd party apps.

My advice would be to not weigh down your Apps/features with a lot of 3rd party dependencies, particularly less-popular modules. If you build a feature based on views and rules, for instance you are probably just fine because these are well supported. But if you App requires dev versions of less popular modules then you are going to have a tough time maintaining the App. That being said, I don't want to discourage people from thinking big. Just know that the more complex the App, the more ongoing maintenance that will be required.

As the maintainer of OpenChurch I want to be able to help others extend functionality without weighing down the main OpenChurch project (or the maintainers) with the burden of supporting additional code outside of core.

Let me know if you are interested in adding your own 3rd party apps to OpenChurch and I can help assist you with some direction. Thanks! -J