There are only around a dozen or so PRB members, so it takes a long time for anything to get approved.

I happen to be on the PRB, so I can take a look this weekend and give some feedback, which should help things a bit.

Thanks for the response. To make this product (concrete5) scalable, maybe the group should look at optimizing this PRB process to maximize the efforts of the 12 users.

It would be great to get this process < 30 days for a full approval cycle. This would help us as a company validate and spend time to create more modules.

Any ideas would be great.

Thanks,
Informatics Inc.

Sorry, didn't get a chance this weekend to look at it. I'll try to here shortly.

To be honest, marketplace sales have dwindled to almost nothing. Themes and gallery addons seem to be the best sellers, from what I hear.

Also, PRB activity has been mostly dead these past few weeks. I'm sure everyone's busy.

Thanks again for your response. That is unfortunate that the marketplace sales have dwindled.

Perhaps a marketplace with more modules would be the cure to dwindling sales. We are interested in increasing and improving the marketplace, but need some help getting our stuff through quicker.

We already have 4-5 modules in our development queue, but are waiting until our current module gets approved and starts getting a few sales.

Thanks,
Informatics Inc.

That might not be the best way to go, waiting for the first one to be getting a few sales. You never now how an add-on is going to go. And having only one add-on in the marketplace might also be a factor that will impact your sales.

I've not found this myself in terms of marketplace sales, I'm still getting quite a few, even for items that I also offer free/MIT elsewhere!

I agree. Mine have been better with the new C5 than the old one. It's still not very much but I have seen an increase of around 50% of my income from the marketplace.

But I have spent time trying to make my market pages better, getting reviews, and enhancing my add-ons. I didn't do any promotion, though.

the offer of a free license always perks reviewers up.

I always offer free licenses to PRB members who review my paid items.

Bribery is always the answer!

I realise this is only a joke, but for those not in on the joke:

Unfortunately not. If reviews were completely dependant on bribery with licenses, then reviewers would only bother to review submissions they had a need for. Submissions that didn't meet a current need of any reviewers would be completely ignored.

Granting a license to a reviewer that has helped a lot can be a nice thank-you gesture after the process is completed, but should never be required or expected.

Agreed. I don't expect anything if I review an addon - it's all voluntary.

The PRB team are all volunteers, which means members time reviewing submissions has to be balanced with their paid work, leisure, family and holidays. Sometimes that all comes together to make lots of PRB effort available, other times it has the opposite and submissions need to be delayed. Overall, the review process now is much faster than it was a few years ago when it was only the core team reviewing submissions.

Some submissions are bigger than others or look like they will require a greater amount of time to review. For example, if at first glance a submission looks like it will take 1/2 a day to review, but a reviewer only has half hour spare, they will look for something else they can do in that half hour, such as reviewing a block that is just a wrapper about a jQuery extension.

The best thing a developer can do to speed a submission through the PRB is to make the reviewers job as easy as possible. Some generic things that help:
- Clear marketplace info and documentation.
- Setup test accounts with any external services a submission needs to be reviewed, so reviewers do not have to.
- Provide suggestions on what can be done to test it.
- Provide test data.
- Be preemptive, anticipate questions and post answers before reviewers ask them.
- Be squeaky-clean about marketplace requirements, so reviewers don't have to waste too much time on things that a developer should have sorted out for themselves.
- Be thorough about testing, so reviewers don't have to waste too much time finding bugs that a developer should already have found and fixed.
- If a review is going to be big (sometimes it can't be helped), provide notes on how it can be split into more manageable chunks of reviewer effort.

If a developer can make it clear that all a reviewer needs to do is already laid out for them and that a review doesn't require an indeterminate commitment of time, then it will get through faster.

Some serial marketplace developers do all the above and even their complex submissions get through the process quickly. No need to say that the converse is also true.

These are not comments about the review in question or any specific review, but generalisations about the review process overall.

PS. Posting here has used up 20 minutes that I could have spent reviewing an addon !

Thanks for information you provided as we will take a look and try to use those methods while deploying.

In response to posting taking 20 minutes to post the message, I understand it took time away from reviewing modules, however by posting in this forum we have now had more reviews on our module in one day than we had in the previous 3 weeks. So although you may not have had the time, someone in the PRB took the effort to review based on this forum.

As we have said previously, we are advocates for c5 as it is a solid, easy to use CMS. We have been trying to find ways to contribute to the marketplace, and the review process is our major hurdle that is keeping us from contributing to the marketplace. Once our current module gets approved and we start to see sales, we will begin production of our next module and start this process again.

We need help so we don't have the issue with a module approval taking > 1 month.

Thanks,
Informatics Inc.