So we made it through SXSW, we've had a couple of weeks to catch our breath and enjoy spring in lovely Portland, and you all may be wondering what we're working on now:

1) We just finished updating our own hosting clients to 5.4. A sub release is likely to come out in the next few weeks with a few bug fixes that aren't deal breakers but certainly make life easier.

2) We're building a karma system for concrete5.org. You may have noticed the "this is the answer" and "i found this helpful" stuff we added around the time we relaunched docs before sxsw. With the new karma system having your reply marked as an answer, having your answered thread marked as helpful, or a few dozen other tasks will get you karma points.

Generally the types of task that win you karma fall into three categories:
o.. Helping others - being active in the forums as in the examples above

o.. Promoting concrete5 - we'll give you points for doing a review of concrete5 on your blog, or posting a how-to on something, or going to a local php meetup and giving a demo, etc. You'll get karma for referring people or traffic to concrete5.

o.. Doin' work - we'll have a roadmap of tasks that we need help on for the core, you get karma points for completing one. Finishing a translation gets you karma. If you're on the PRB, posting to a package in review gets you points. etc.. You'll get karma for spending dollars in the marketplace.

Why do you want karma? Well it'll be joined to badges, it'll impact your ranking in sort order on community pages, yadda yadda - ask foursquare why anyone uses their stuff, people just do.

ANNND

We're gonna have monthly prizes. Think of it as an ongoing raffle with each karma point counting as a ticket. More good work you do, more chances you have of winning something. Prizes might be swag, cute topical things we think up, and possibly most interestingly - credit on concrete5.org.

So do good work, you'll be recognized for it, and you may even get a few free add-ons out of it.

3) We're building a offline promotion tool kit for people who want to go evangelize concrete5 in their local community. We already have some meetups happening but we haven't done much to help the people who run them, so we're trying to put resources together that make that whole process easier and more enticing. The karma system is obviously deeply connected to that.

4) We're starting to think about support more. We've got these neeto project pages now, and we gutted the way we used to offer support to our own hosting clients. We'd like to run support through those project pages. We'd like to do that in a way that YOU might offer support to your own clients through them, or you might even find new clients who need support you can offer through them.

5) We're going to release some new add-ons before long including a generalized classifieds system and a car dealer app that's quite a bit more expensive than the typical add-ons are today, but would power a car sales site right out the box quite well.

That's what I know, hope it helps you to know it too.
-frz