Thanks for coming up with some good ideas on how things could be improved. The biggest obstacle to all of the improvements that I can see is time. I feel that time is one of the factors preventing people from contributing now as well, or at least I hope it is. Creating additional organization, and soliciting people to contribute all requires time. For me time has been in short supply. I'm guessing the other core members have also been tight on time as well.
I always felt that if people were interested in contributing, and had a real interest in it, they would. You can't really force people to work for free, and to be honest working on open source requires willpower and determination. If people don't feel ready or don't feel that they can help I don't really know what can be done to remedy that. I know in the past, and the present, the plans for CakePHP haven't always been crystal clear and transparent. We've been trying to improve that situation, by putting up wiki pages with ways to contribute, and what the current planned out changes are. All this has been put in lighthouse wiki pages, which may or may not be the best place for it. But its a place. As for outstanding issues, lighthouse is a great place to find all the known outstanding issues in CakePHP, and I recommend that as a starting place for anyone interested in helping out. As for plans that extend beyond the current plans for 2.0, the only thing that the current team has really discussed is a move to php5.3, and the long overdue refactoring/rebuild of the model layer. But not much has been discussed in detail for either of those topics. There has also been a good start on re-writing/updating the documentation for 2.0. We're hoping to solve a few problems that exist with the current book, in addition to content updates. Providing offline documentation in multiple formats, and moving the version control into git are the two main problems being solved. This documentation update still needs a ton of work, and is another good place for people to get involved if they want. There actually is a plugins site, it doesn't have an installer, but it does maintain an index, and provides the ability to search through plugins and available code. http://cakepackages.com. -Mark On Apr 7, 1:29 am, keymaster <[email protected]> wrote: > > What do you have in mind to solve this? > > Well, what I had in mind, actually, was precisely not a passive "people are > welcome to fork the repo and patch bugs themselves and submit them for > approval". That might bring us a few isolated contributions here and there, > but that's not really what the framework needs at this point, in my opinion. > > The framework seems to becoming a framework supported by one person, Mark > Story, and I don't believe it is healthy for any framework to be on the > shoulders of only one person, no matter how great a developer he is. > > I was hoping that whoever is "in charge" of cakephp these days might > consider doing all or some of the following: > > 1. Identify within the cake core 10 or more reasonably defined areas. > > 2. Put up a wiki with a section for each one of these areas. Describe in > general what the area does, how it currently works, what deficiencies there > are, what things need to be done to get to the next level. > > 3. Actively solicit a team leader for each area, as well as additional > developers who want to assist that team leader in building the area up, > implementing some of the proposed ideas, and proposing additional ideas. > > 3. Set up a developer forum, where each area can be discussed for ideas for > improvement. Make the forum visible to the community, so others, can view > and feel part of the ongoing development thought. If they have development > related ideas for the core, or the issues being discussed, they have a place > to add them. > > 4. Add a blog to cakephp.org with a "weekly news on cakephp development". > There you would describe the updates made this week, summarize some of the > issues being discussed, mention new sites recently built with cake, mention > other blogs or sources which are discussing cake (see the Symfony2 blog > "week of symfony - great idea). > > 5. Make a list of side projects which need to be developed for the cake > community, separate from the core, and actively solicit developers to make > it happen. > > eg. > A) a cake plugins site, modelled after Joomla extensions, for all > plugins, descriptions, votes, community reviews, links to github or wherever > they are stored, editor's picks, etc. > B) the cake documentation project would have been a great thing to > outsource to someone this way. > > 6. Have a "Cake bug fix blitz-day" once a month, where all developers are > encouraged to take one bug and fix it. > > The above are only a small sample of things one can (should) do. I'm sure > people can come up with many more ideas to help. > > Please don't attack me for saying this stuff. I am on your side. I want to > see a healthy cake. A framework cannot continue to be based on the free time > of a single person. I believe quite strongly that if a "developer culture" > for the core is not cultivated, it will not be the best thing for cake's > future. -- Our newest site for the community: CakePHP Video Tutorials http://tv.cakephp.org Check out the new CakePHP Questions site http://ask.cakephp.org and help others with their CakePHP related questions. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php
