Magento

Thanks for the comments. Magento Connect is currently in the work and phase I will be released with the new community site in the next few days. We have ambitious plans to produce an effective, quality catalog/marketplace of extensions along with a distribution component (AKA Magento Downloader - more info on that soon) that will manage the install and upgrades.

In regards to community testing to validate extensions, that is something that is certainly important and we’d love to see the community form testing groups / teams to achieve this.

The Magento Downloader concept sounds amazing, more or less like the firefox method I think would be great.  Another thing to reference is maybe the way Installer works on Jailbroken Iphones, can install/uninstall It warns if it comes from an untrusted source.  Certain sources are trusted after proving themselves over and over in the community, and they are places that do their due dilligence when it comes to modifications.  The other ones give you a big red warning sign. 

I think maybe another way is for people to drop a folder or file or files into a folder, that would then do the rest on its own and show up in admin with a checkbox or an enable/disable dropdown. When the files are dropped in, it instructs magento on everythign from setting permissions to what gets modified, this can then be enabled or disabled in admin, so if something happens to get broken it can get reported and disabled, without extensive modification.

This is all great “in theory”

The Drupal system for modules is quite good in particular there is strict version numbering on contributions so that they will only work with that core version of the main app. Also there is a repository where there are stable released versions and unofficial builds so that testers can run the unofficial builds on their test sites where as the tested builds can be run on production sites.