New module submissions are a regularly occurring event and you will find many modules that have been submitted as tarballs in the Ticket system that are not available in the online system. Why is that?

The FreePBX project is designed as a Framework that can easily accommodate new modules and for that reason, new modules get written and submitted. This does not mean that we put every module that comes along into the project. As the project has matured and stabilized, we are putting a lot more thought into the architecting of the FreePBX as it continues to evolve and mature into a world class product. In order to do that, we need to carefully evaluate what officially enters the system since adopting a module has many implications. We try very hard once something becomes part of the project to take on the commitment of maintaining and supporting it and making sure that future upgrades of the project will continue to work with the Modules that are part of it. If you are thinking about writing a module that you would like to be part of the core project, you should talk with one of the active developers in advance.

This does not mean that the other modules are less valuable or inferior in any way, if we don't adopt them. In the past we have not had any mechanism to facilitate and house these modules, other than a tar ball stuck in a module submission ticket somewhere. We will be working on addressing this shortly, so that we can have an SVN repository location for such third party modules to provide easier access. We are also investigating the use of the command line module_admin program (you probably didn't know that existed did you?) to provide an online ability to install such third party modules. Some day we will get this into the GUI but there are other changes that need to happen in the GUI to accommodate this change.