Hi,
It’s been good to see this discussion. It highlights some of the facts and issues about resources in Paratext 8 quite well. As dhigby shared, a major goal in the PT8 + DBL effort has been to clarify permissions for use of content as resources in Paratext, to make it easier to make content available (and to update content on user’s machines), and to make additional content available. The restriction is that the content needs to be in DBL.
Responding to the matter of local vs official resources – Send/Receive is not really the intended the way to distribute content for resource use. Official resources in Paratext are intentionally locked down much more than a shared project. This is really a maintenance problem too, and for most cases it is the managing organisation who needs to grant permission.
Regarding getting content in DBL – Yes, there is a more centralized approach (but both UBS and WBT have more than one person helping with this). The requirements for placing projects in DBL are much greater than adding someone to the project with Send/Receive. A project must pass a certain set checks, and have an additional set of metadata associated to it (which will all come from the Registry in PT8). It is not that the process is necessarily hard, but that it has tighter requirements. Generally speaking, what goes into DBL (for the most part) must be ‘publishable’ quality (even if the project is only partially complete). In many ways this is a very good thing - because the content can be shared with partners, and because the content is a solid model (in terms of markup / syntax as well as content).
jmkla