What Happened to the Sitecore Marketplace?

At the time of writing, when you search for the keyword “Sitecore Marketplace” on Google to look for a module, results like https://www.sitecore.com/products/marketplace or https://marketplace.sitecore.net/ will redirect you back to the Sitecore Connectors page. What is happening?

Of course you would do more searches trying to locate where to download the modules from the previous marketplace, especially if you’re working on an older version of Sitecore (8.x or 9.x) but to no avail. “Maybe I wasn’t searching hard enough?” you thought.

Further along in your discovery, you’d come across a still “live” and indexable version of Sitecore Marketplace in a slightly tweaked URL (https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en) and think that maybe it wasn’t totally abandoned yet. But when you clicked on the links after finding a module, it still led you back to square one, to the Connectors page. You’re experiencing what is called a “marketplaception” – a marketplace within a marketplace. You’re confused.

Update as of Nov. 28, 2022: There is a workaround pointed out by Pika, which is to copy the link of the packages after searching for them from the old Sitecore Marketplace, then removing the .aspx extension in the result URL like this:

The module page is still accessible and the packages downloadable.

But then, the question still remains, what would be the next steps from Sitecore?

So, together with Carlos Rodriguez, Sitecore MVP, we gathered inputs to see what the community thinks.

According to Pete Navarra, aka @sitecorehacker, the challenge or,

“The hardest part of the Marketplace was keeping it current. Modules would get posted and then go stale, even though the development of the module continued.”

And Richard Seal, Lead Partner Technical Advocate at Sitecore, also commented that “it pretty much died of natural causes” and observed that “even SPE stopped updating the site…”

But, why?

Yup, you’ve guessed it.

GitHub.

Aaron Bickle, one of the core contributors of Sitecore, noticed that,

“Even when the marketplace was around, people were still maintaining GitHub repos. They just kept updating the repo and not updating the marketplace.”

And because of this disconnected Marketplace-GitHub listing, there’s a general direction from Sitecore to veer away from it and promote the Connectors page instead.

Jason St-Cyr, Director of Developer Relations at Sitecore, actually confirmed this by saying,

The new Connectors marketplace was what the general corporate team wanted to do from a marketplace perspective. So they took the domain as a redirect to send people looking for add-ons over to that, as it is going to be managed and kept up to date.

But since there’s a consensus around the community that a listing index of GitHub repos would be helpful, Jason agrees and sees the value saying,

Hopefully one day we can get some time and find a way for the new Developer Portal search to index GitHub repos from the community so we can add that as a source and pull everybody’s repos in… or some other solution. I think a centralized listing of community repos would be a great to have!

So there! If you’re a Sitecore developer maintaining an older version of Sitecore and in need of a module to use for a specific requirement, at this point you can either do the workaround, search for other solutions or ask the community. And if you’re looking for a way to contribute Sitecore modules, continue maximizing your GitHub, until the time when a Sitecore listing of recognized repos is available. Cheers!