Using SourceForge...
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... or any other open source management tool.
If you want to get people contributing, it would seem sensible to make it easy. I appreciate that you have been working really hard to push out release candidates toward the end of 2008 but if you want the community to actually get behind this project and start contributing (bug reports, fixes, features, etc.) then surely now is the time to move the source to an open source platform. I am thinking SourceForge or similar.
One benefit of this would also be that you can stop spending time developing your own in-house bug-tracking and feature request software and let the tool developers to that work. The current bug tracking tool is OK but really it could do with a bit of spicing up to make it really smooth - it is notable that it is difficult to find if the bug you are reporting is already reported.
Moreover if you put the source and project management out in a tool such as SF you will get even more developers coming over to check out Concrete5 and this can only mean more sites out there, more testing, faster bug fixes and better software.
If you want to get people contributing, it would seem sensible to make it easy. I appreciate that you have been working really hard to push out release candidates toward the end of 2008 but if you want the community to actually get behind this project and start contributing (bug reports, fixes, features, etc.) then surely now is the time to move the source to an open source platform. I am thinking SourceForge or similar.
One benefit of this would also be that you can stop spending time developing your own in-house bug-tracking and feature request software and let the tool developers to that work. The current bug tracking tool is OK but really it could do with a bit of spicing up to make it really smooth - it is notable that it is difficult to find if the bug you are reporting is already reported.
Moreover if you put the source and project management out in a tool such as SF you will get even more developers coming over to check out Concrete5 and this can only mean more sites out there, more testing, faster bug fixes and better software.
we actually did start on sourceForge before we got these light forums together. We're still ranked around #1000 out of their 250k projects there, but we're pretty happy to only be using that system for serving files today.
To be honest, the interface is pretty brutal. While I totally recognize we've got some effort to go before these forums are a stand alone product, the path is getting shorter and shorter for them and our bug trackers as well.. These are going to be valuable add-ons for the concrete5 community so its worth our while to finish them.
If it were a time tracker, I'd agree with you. We use getIntervals.com by the way for internal task and time management... great (not free) app.
The bigger reason is this, we need to do far more than what those sites provide. There's already a large international concrete5 community growing, and our challenge is to bring them together into one brand and network that makes sense. Our solution will be to get these forums shining, and connect them through openID across all of the local user group and other language sites that have already sprung up. We need to provide a marketplace where this community can trust one another.. We have partner programs where segments of this community can openly communicate in private.. etc.
if concrete5 were any other product, I would agree with you. But when you're shooting to be THE building material for the web - using someone else's for something as fundamental as forums seems like a bad call..
I also like that i can move content from forums over to documentation very easily here, and that I'm creating content I own and serve in the forums instead of watching our best knowledge database go up and down on someone else's whim (which we did see at times...)
Any rate, if I'm missing something, if there's some critical feature we've failed to deliver on here that's keeping us back, I'm all ears..
we have a bug tracker, we have these forums.. here's the link to concrete5 as Project of the Month on SourceForge... so we already got the PR.. whats left?
http://sourceforge.net/community/potm-200810/...