Enhanced listings
We've made some small updates to the display of package information to better help people understand what they are viewing and why the package may be a useful addition to their Umbraco solution.
Most obvious is the update to promote winners of the Umbraco package awards, via a panel displayed on their listing:
We show all winners and runners-up that have won awards in the past two years, as well as the nominees for 2023 and those packages elevated to the "hall of fame". We will of course update this with the winner for 2023 when announced.
You can read more about the Package Hall of Fame, and see who’s up for Umbraco Awards in the nominee announcement blog post.
Under the hood improvements
Less visible - though hopefully still appreciable in terms of website speed - are the updates we've made to improve performance and functionality by utilizing additional infrastructure components.
We use a SQL database as the data storage solution for the package information we've synchronized from NuGet and GitHub. And up to now, we've also used that, with a layer of in-memory caching over the API, to serve the website search and package details display.
With recent and planned updates, we are introducing two new components: Redis caching and Azure Cognitive Search.
With Redis we can provide a distributed cache that gives us a few benefits, the main one being that the cached information is persistent across restarts, meaning first requests should be as quick as subsequent ones.
We also get some performance boost by using Azure Cognitive Search, with functional improvements too via the use of a dedicated search engine over SQL queries and full-text indexing.
If you are interested in some more of the technical details behind how we have used these tools, please check back to the blog in the upcoming weeks where we'll be sharing further articles on this topic.
Package popularity
In addition to "number of NuGet downloads", we have introduced a “most active installs” filter, which orders packages based on the number of active installs obtained from CMS package telemetry data over the past 14 days.
We will shortly be updating the “Most popular” packages presented on the Marketplace homepage to use this value, as we feel it has some advantages in giving a measure of package popularity.
We've previously reached out to package developers via the package newsletter to inform about this, as it could be that some will need to make some small updates to ensure their package gets the correct credit on this measure.
Marketplace documentation
We've migrated the Marketplace documentation for package developers, explaining how to list your packages, to the new DXP space within the Umbraco documentation website.
By leveraging the existing documentation platform we get improved tools - and people! - for reviewing the instructions, and can open up for PRs should anyone find improvements they would like to make.
You'll still find this documentation linked from the footer of the Marketplace website where it was signposted before.
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As always, thanks to the package developers that have taken the time to list the nearly 250 packages we have available on the website now.. Also to those who have provided feedback on how they have found the process given ideas for how the website can be improved. If you have any, we welcome suggestions on the issue tracker.
If you want to be updated on the latest Umbraco package-related news and events you can subscribe to the Umbraco Package Developer Newsletter and we'll be sure to keep you informed.
