What's Going On With Plazmic?

*UPDATE* - Just got an email from Mike Kirkup, Director, Developer Relations at Research In Motion explaining the happenings with Plazmic and their site and it is as I had hoped, an effort to reorganize and provide better offerings for developers. Thanks to Mike for taking the time to explain it for us all.

This is one step among many to bring the Plazmic products inline with the other offerings from RIM to our developer community by bringing it in-house to ensure that it receives the same level of attention and focus that our other developer tools receive today.  This is most definitely a vote towards improved tooling and development of themes and content on the BlackBerry platform.  We are also phasing out the existing Plazmic discussion forums and moving that discussion over to the BlackBerry Developer Support Forums along with moving the existing posts on that board to the new board to ensure we don’t lose the great information accumulated over the years.

It wasn't that long ago that RIM released the "update patch" for their Content Developers Kit that enabled the ability to create themes for the 9630 Tour and the BlackBerry Curve 8520. Theme developers across the board were happy to see it's release but soon found out it was obviously not the most ideal update to have, and more likely should have been marked as a beta then anything else. Plazmic has long been a tool that theme developers love to hate, it's buggy and has some issues to say the least.

The past week some interesting stuff has happened with the Plazmic.com website as Daniel Black pointed out in the CrackBerry Forums. Plazmic.com, the domain used for all things Plazmic, has mysteriously been redirected to a general BlackBerry page with all the download links for the tools in one spot. Maybe RIM is revamping the site? Maybe the site was no longer useful? Seems rather odd to me that they would pull it considering it housed their community forums.

Either way, the redirect and removal of Plazmic.com as a site seems rather odd. With the BlackBerry Developers Conference coming up, hopefully this is a sign of better things to come from Plazmic but I'm not going to hold my breath (and I'm sure some theme developers out there won't either).

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