Hi Roman, Thanks a lot for your feedback. Lots of good points.
It's also good to see that you like the way XWiki is being developed! :) At some point, we should put on a wiki page all the good ideas that emerged from this thread. Thanks -Vincent On Jan 19, 2011, at 3:15 PM, coldserenity wrote: > > Hi Sergiu, > > Thanks for the interesting story :) > > > * How can we help speed up the growth of the community? > Continue doing this brilliant work you do. And ... > > > * How can we attract more developers outside XWiki SAS? > ... here's a list of some ideas (might contain crazy ones) > * First thing is to bring more users (see > http://www.google.com/trends?q=xwiki%2C+foswiki%2C+twiki%2C+confluence ) > among which new developers shall emerge > * At many points XWiki is more powerful than Confluence, outline them > * You have to populate the knowledge about XWiki to the Community > * If you want to attract developers, advertize among developers > * Advertize with features developers and development teams like > * Probably advertize XWiki (sourceforge, apache, codehaus) through ads > * Try to convince Apache (or at least projects within Apache you have close > relations with), Codehaus etc. to host it's numerous docs on XWiki > * XWiki functionality as a document storage is more than sufficient. Build > more applications on top of it (e.g. agile tools, project management tools) > to attract more users. (another e.g. we try to use XWiki for storing all the > knowledge about our project, including meetings, user stories etc. It would > be nice to bring in some agile features like meeting minutes, product > backlog, integration with Jira) > * Ability to build applications on top of XWiki is its main advantage you > have to extend and advertise to a wide community. > * If I owned a software development company I'd send my > developers/managers/architects for internship on XWiki for 3-6 iteration > cycles to learn all that cool things you do. Maybe I'm not the only one? > > Some concerns > * Main XWiki competitor is Confluence > * Unfortunately for XWiki, when one buys Jira - he's likely to buy > Confluence > * Now is the moment, of truth, XWiki either becomes popular, or vanishes in > the fight with Confluence (which might start or already started receiving > features from XWiki) > * I really hope that XWiki.org will survive not to be either bought by or > turn into a commercial company (like Compass and EHCache were somewhere in > the past). It so demotivating for the open-source committer that someone has > used his hard and volunteer work to get richer. > > Some major points from the story below > * SearchEngineOptimization matters > (http://www.google.com.ua/search?q=wiki+engine) > * Project Homepage UI matters > * Project UI matters (and currently its good, keep an eye on it ;) ) > * Ease of installation matters > * Ease of configuration / Hot configuration (ability to change smth without > restarting the server) matters. And currently its the way you go (plugin > management module) > * Modularity / Extensibility (with numerous plug-ins) matter > * Community (those who are able to support you) matter > * Documentation / Tutorials matter (thanks for the numerous docs on how to > setup and tune XWiki) > * How easy you input your information matters (WYSIWYG + Document import > rock!) > * Healthy development process matters > * Being heard by the community is nice > * Frequent feature-fruitful releases are nice > > THE STORY BELOW > Now I will tell you my story of getting addicted to XWiki. > We required a wiki for our project and from all of the available choices we > initially took FOS Wiki. However having an experience with Attassian > Confluence, I neither liked the UI nor syntax. Being a Java developer > (Tomcat/JBoss) I as well hated complex installation of that wiki itself as > well as plug-ins for it. The structure of that wiki was hard to understand. > Funny to mention but most of all I hated how it formats the Java code :) > Soon after we started using FOS Wiki, having that heavy feeling of > something isn't right I did a quick final random poke for other open-source > frameworks (preferably Java, where I could develop the feature I miss or > patch the bug I find). I must say that XWiki was far not the first one I > found but ... > I was conquered with sweet-as-a-candy design of XWiki site (Toucan Skin at > that moment). > So I quickly downloaded the installer, set it up on my local machine and > started getting more and more astonished with the nice features XWiki > provided. Just to name few > * It had more logical (or at least more obvious) organization of > documents > * Eye-pleasing UI > * Easy installation > * A ton of plugins and extension > * All was configurable and in many cases even from UI without the need to > restart the server > Hell, I was even capable to hack (patch) the code colorer library to use > styles I wanted (later was added as config parameter)! > * The syntax 2.0 was nice (again, thanks for the recent emoticons feature > :) ) and the code from WYSIWYG editor came out clean and shining. > * ... and logical addition is the Word documents import (no more > download/edit/reupload attachments!!!) > That was EXACTLY what I was looking for! > And then I've learned programming abilities of XWiki which made me totally > convinced that it's the most advanced open source wiki tool available. > > I have subscribed to the mailing list, and followed how the process of > development was organized. > It was another pleasant surprise. Starting from the ability to participate > in decisions like voting for/discussing UI/Code enhancements and ending with > how often the releases were made and how well iterative time-boxed approach > was applied (especially taking into account that team is distributed). > Modular structure (obviously inspired by close relationships with Maven ;) ) > of the project and how well it has been architected for modularity deserves > separate words. From development point of view, your project is Perfect. It > would be very nice for a junior developer, junior software architect, junior > PM to work in such team to get that knowledge. So one thing you could do is > to establish a sort of courses for developers from other companies. > The community turned out to be responsive and I was able to solve any issue > I had with XWiki (quite few I must say). > I also like the amount and quality of various documentation (from user to > development guides) that helped me a lot not to post dummy FAQs on users > mailing list. > > Being so fond of XWiki why wouldn't I become a constantly available > contributor? In my case the factors are time and inspiration. Most of the > time I either come home late and tired or don't have an inspiration. E.g. > while I write this message it's far after the midnight on my clock. I would > need to be a real geek, to start coding ... whom, I guess, I'm not, like > many other XWiki users. > > However I do feel there are things (above) that are going to attract > people. > > > * Is there anybody that would like contribute more / become a committer? > I wish my employer would send me for internship on XWiki ;) > > > * Do users believe that a foundation on top of XWiki will help attract more > developers? > If the foundation will be responsible ONLY for managing donations that would > go to donation-driven feature development. But you don't need a whole > foundation for it, right? > > > * Do you (the community) think this is a good idea and it would help? > It is definitely attractive. Yet code quality might suffer, because employee > working for money is different from open source contributor working for > beauty > > > * Would you be willing to contribute/donate to the project? > Money donation did cross my mind when I opened Sergiu's page :) > Well, I try to contribute to XWiki when I have time/inspiration (like this > post). Not more nor less. > > Dear reader, hope you did not get too bored by now. Thanks for reading it > all. > > Regards, > Roman > -- > View this message in context: > http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/State-of-the-XWiki-Community-tp5919692p5939808.html > Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > _______________________________________________ > users mailing list > users@xwiki.org > http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users _______________________________________________ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
