Umbraco Marketplace Update: 2023

There have been many package developers making the effort to market and promote their works since the launch of the new Umbraco Marketplace website at the beginning of December last year. The website has up to 200 products and integrations available in just one month. Since the launch, some time has been spent making a few modifications in an effort to simplify the process of listing packages from the perspective of a package developer. We'll offer a quick round-up of the new features in this article, as well as highlight others that were available at launch but that we can tell not everyone is using.

Validating your listing

We hope that listing your package or integrating with it has been very simple, but please be aware that there are a few additional steps to do if you want to get the most out of the presentation. It's not ideal, for instance, to have to wait until the planned synchronisation to confirm that everything is functioning as it should. This is counteracted with a feature that will assist you in making sure you have the required tags and optional JSON file setup in real-time.

You can submit the package ID and optionally the JSON file's contents on the validation page, where some validation checks are run to ensure that it complies with the standards for listing on the Marketplace. Checks consist of:

• Presence of the required NuGet tag
• Retrieval of the hosted JSON file from the NuGet project URL
• Schema validation of the file
• Validation of specific elements like URLs
• presence of a custom readme file.

With this set up, you'll be able to review your prepared listing and, once confirmed, have confidence that, when the planned synchronisation takes place, your product will be classified and shown as you anticipate. After a successful validation, you can also ask for an immediate synchronisation of your package information rather than waiting for the update to happen according to the regular schedule.

Overriding NuGet information

The website's content is mostly derived from two sources: NuGet and the supplementary data supplied by package owners. In a few instances, customers wanted the package's details to be shown differently on NuGet and the Umbraco marketplace for valid reasons. In order for you to better convey your package to that audience on the Umbraco marketplace, we now give you the option to submit a package title, description, readme information, and author name.

For instance, it makes perfect sense to include the phrase "Umbraco" in the title or description of a product on NuGet, but on the marketplace, everything is about Umbraco. Instead of displaying the value obtained from NuGet, display the value that is present in the title and/or description fields of the umbraco-marketplace.json file.

Similar to that, by default, Umbraco will show the readme data gathered from a package's listing on NuGet. However, Umbraco will import and show a file called umbraco-marketplace-readme.md if it is hosted in the same directory as the umbraco-marketplace.json file.

Automating contributors and packages by the same author

Package developers were given a way to explicitly list collaborators and other packages created by the same author with the initial release. However, since switching to an automated method of importing this information, you can now omit or remove this information for both of them.

If a GitHub source code repository is provided in the NuGet information, and you include the flag SyncContributorsFromRepository in the umbraco-marketplace.json file, Umbraco will retrieve the contributors from GitHub. In this manner, you will always be aware of who contributed to your source code.

Multiple packages for different Umbraco versions

Numerous packages are versioned with Umbraco; as a result, if a new version of a package is issued with changes required for, say, Umbraco 11, it will be released under the same NuGet package ID with a new major version. There will be a "MyPackage.10" for Umbraco 10, a "MyPackage.11" for Umbraco 11, etc., as many developers prefer to generate new NuGet package IDs for subsequent versions.

You can simply list them separately if that works with your configuration. However, it might not be the best solution, neither for you to maintain listings for various versions nor for those searching for packages and discovering what appears to be repeated.?Instead, you may simply include your most recent package and specify which additional packages should be utilised for earlier Umbraco versions using the VersionSpecificPackageIds section of the umbraco-marketplace.json file.

Remember to only list the "installable component."

Many package authors decide to divide their Umbraco package into different NuGet packages, such as having "MyPackage.Core" and "MyPackage," for example. Customers of the package will install the latter into their Umbraco web application projects.

There is no real point in putting the other components, and they will most likely appear to be duplicates. Therefore, please be sure to just tag the one that you anticipate the majority of customers will wish to install. If you accidentally tagged both, they will be immediately delisted if you remove the tag from the package components you don't wish to list in your future release.

Listing of "sub-packages"

A package may occasionally have one or more "add-ons," which are additional packages that complement the original one in some way but don't really deserve their own full listing. These might be modifications of starter kit themes or add-ons for using uSync or Umbraco Deploy.

They might simply be listed as usual, but once again, the listings might make them appear to be duplicates. Umbraco has the choice of keeping them on the main package's website as a collection but removing them from the major category listings and search results. To use this feature, simply set the NuGet ID of the principal package in the IsSubPackageOf column of the umbraco-marketplace.json file.