Thank you Mark for your post.
> The biggest obstacle to all of the improvements that I can see is time… For me time has been in short supply. Completely understandable. You should never put in any more time than you are comfortable giving. I think everyone realizes clearly that you are putting more development hours into this project than anyone else, and more than anyone expects. > Creating additional organization, and soliciting people to contribute all requires time. Agreed, but the unfortunate truth is that leveraging the work of other people is the only way to eliminate the very realistic risk of any one person bottlenecking the entire project. Consider what would happen if for whatever reason life throws your way, you decide to move onto bigger and better things next week. What kind of situation would this project be in? How many people are there with the time and desire and knowledge to keep the ball rolling. If there are such people, where are they now? (sorry for the tough questions) If cake is to succeed and grow, it must come to depend on as wide as possible a distribution of active contributors, rather than the efforts of any single individual. Since it is open source where people do this for enjoyment only, there needs to be a development environment which will be interesting and enjoyable to attract and keep core developers. The points I mentioned in my earlier post, I think, are a necessary prerequisite for this to happen. I think developers will be attracted to interesting discussions/debates of architectures, implementation choices, refactorings, incorporations of new directions. Allowing people to read what is being discussed, seeing the interesting problems the core is facing, and allowing people to contribute their own good ideas will get people interested. The result should be a bubbling up of more developers desiring to roll up their sleeves and take on development responsibilities within the core. The role of the lead developer becomes ever more important, as he must review and throttle all this, but perhaps equally important it sounds like we need some kind of an organizer/communicator/personality type person to engender an environment which is conducive to attracting new core developers. A developer can be an introvert and create outstanding code, but a project also need a bit of a marketing/extrovert type person (a separate role) to interest people in getting involved. > 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 think if we implemented some of the ideas mentioned earlier, you will get more people interested in core issues, and you will see more volunteers stepping forward. There are 15,000 members on this list. You will get people. > 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. That is a great first step, and it allows people to see what is being done. But basically it puts everyone into a passive movie theatre mode just sitting back in their chairs, looking up at the screen and waiting to see what the core developer(s) is/are going to put up for us on lighthouse next. It’s not a discussion, and is not really conducive to getting people actively involved. If there are no real discussions going on already about development direction within the current core team members, such that you think a developer forum will be too inactive if it was created, that already is a sign of a hidden problem. If this is true, I would venture to say that is a major red light for this project. In any event, our purpose is not to look backwards, but put processes in place to rectify this going forward. On the other hand if there currently are active discussions among the core developers, why not discuss them on an open forum, to generate developer interest? You will get people involved that way. The benefits of a back-and-forth between intelligent developers cross examining development issues under discussion cannot be underestimated. Have a look at some of the intensely interesting and often heated and passionate development discussions on the Symfony2 or Zend Framework 2 developer lists. You’ll see what I am aiming at for our project, and what I think is missing here. I have no doubt we can benefit immensely from that kind of fire in our own cake project. > There has also been a good start on re-writing/updating the documentation for 2.0. That’s great, your work is really appreciated. Perhaps maybe a first step, which doesn’t take any time, is to do two things: 1. Create a Google group for core development discussion, and link to it from the cakephp.org site as well as from this Google group. There should be a sticky post which makes it clear that while one need not be a core member to participate, the topics are strictly limited to core development issues, not userland issues. People should politely be redirected to the main cake users group for all userland type questions. 2. A weekly blog post on cakephp.org which summarizes the weekly activity in development. This will certainly generates an ongoing interest in the project. Sorry for the (very) long post – I’ve hope I haven’t overused my welcome. Hopefully these ideas will be considered by the core team as a positive contribution. I am speaking as someone with the greatest respect for phpNut (cake's esteemed founder and visionary, without whom none of our 15,000 developers would have a cake to work with, and who continues to put all his efforts into evangelizing this project more than anyone else), Mark Story (of course) and all the current and previous core developers who have given selflessly of their valuable time to make cake what it is. -- 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
