IPS Policies on Plug-Ins?

[Allen Bradford]

Some customers of IPS prefer to stay "native" and stay within the available functions offered with IPS. The reasons are varied and not the point of this Topic.

Questions to IPS staff or others:

What if any is the the vetting process by IPS for third parties to add plug-in uploads to the Marketplace?

If a customer purchased a plug-in from IPS Marketplace, and upon upload it caused issues will IPS Support help and correct the problem(s)?

Does IPS ever add popular plug-in capabilities to their native software?  Or is their a clause of some sort prohibiting this?

 

[Colonel_mortis]

21 minutes ago, Brad Eden said:

What if any is the the vetting process by IPS for third parties to add plug-in uploads to the Marketplace?

I believe they are checked to make sure that they aren't malicious, but they are not thoroughly checked to ensure there are no bugs or anything like that.

22 minutes ago, Brad Eden said:

If a customer purchased a plug-in from IPS Marketplace, and upon upload it caused issues will IPS Support help and correct the problem(s)?

IPS support would simply suggest disabling the plugin and contacting the author.

22 minutes ago, Brad Eden said:

Does IPS ever add popular plug-in capabilities to their native software?  Or is their a clause of some sort prohibiting this?

Many of the features being added in 4.2 were available in the marketplace previously.

[Mark]

Naturally sometimes lots of people have an idea, and someone makes a plugin that does that while we are planning (or subsequently we plan) the same thing.

Perhaps a good example which doesn't single anyone out is Reactions. This idea has been a growing trend on the internet over the last few years. We've been thinking about doing this for a while and in this case there wasn't (to my knowledge) a plugin to do it on our platform but there easily could have been. That wouldn't particularly prevent (or encourage) us to do it. We do what our customers ask for and we think will make the product better. And we always implement it in the best way we can (I think our implementation of Reactions totally blows away how a lot of other sites have done the same sort of thing).

[Daddy]

Whilst IPS does not provide support for 3rd party applications they do, however, provide support if anything were to come awry caused by 3rd party. They just don't support the application itself.

As far as legitimacy all submissions are analysed by ISP staff before it is approved and available on the marketplace but you should always use caution when installing and using 3rd party content. From experience I've used hundreds of 3rd party applications and extensions and the worst thing I've come across is some pretty bad interfaces.

As far as implementing 3rd party ideas into their software it's usually the ones that have the most frequent requests and is rarely done as it's essential to keep their software lightweight *I would hope so anyways.*

 

Hope this helps!