http://modxcms.com/community/happening-now/ - very useful link indeed in terms of showing activity - also EXTREMELY well buried (in the sense that it’s the 9th link down on the last menu item across the top of the page - I know technically there’s only two clicks to get there before someone points that out

). Should be on the homepage perhaps in a more condensed form?
All I’ve been trying to say is that if you can’t find things like this in obvious places, it’ll turn a lot of people away. People looking for a CMS aren’t going to click through pages to find things that are on many sites’ homepages to find out stuff like that. Businesses will be looking to adopt a CMS that’s up-to-date, and I know from my experience that business-people can get twitchy when they see things like "2008-12-23" as the date the latest version was released - which is fair enough - but then not see an obvious link to news updates on the homepage. I’ve had a few people ask me if it’s even being updated any more because it’s not immediately obvious and business-people often have little time to check things out in this level of detail (of course I’ve talked them round and it’s in use across a dozen sites that I’ve built). That page you linked to above is gold dust in terms of showing what’s going on and I’d not even seen it before!
Since this is an open-source project, completely funded and built on user contributions, we graciously accept and encourage either donations to pay for the labor required to upkeep and do the requests you’ve made, or volunteer-contributed works that will fulfill those stated requirements. Since no one pays for this product, service, or website.
I get that - I’ve been here a while and even contributed a forum bridge that’s sorely in need of an update

Seems to be a bit of defensiveness around here when people make occasionally-blunt suggestions (forum posts, as with SMS messages, lose all emotion in translation sadly, so imagine an encouraging tone rather than a blunt one to my posts

). All I’m trying to do is comment on what might get more NEW people to check out MODx which would then hopefully turn into more contributors for you. If I had a team of web guys working for me I’d happily donate resources and time, and if I had a few beans to scrape together right at the moment I’d donate money, but both are sadly lacking at present.
Snarkiness aside, in this community, things get done faster when you contribute. If you’ve not contributed, the core team is less likely to move on your suggestions. Why? Because, well, this is a community - not a consumer market. If you’d like to see more done to the MODx.Browser implementation in Revo, then I recommend posting that in JIRA, visiting and posting in the MODx Next forum, checking out the latest SVN for Revo, and getting to know the community.
I’ve got plenty of little things to contribute, as well as bigger things like an IPB forum bridge which is 95% done for IPB 2.3.6, however as with you guys time is precious and currently I have extremely little to spare, otherwise I would love to post up everything I’ve done on MODx in the past few years.
Also this part of your quote doesn’t come across well - "If you’ve not contributed, the core team is less likely to move on your suggestions". So... that reads as "if you’re an end-user and have feedback on our product in terms of usability, but aren’t a coder or other form of contributor contributing to the project then we won’t take your suggestions as seriously" for that particular situation. Again, a bit blunt there (sorry), but giving preference to the people who know how to use the software already isn’t necessarily going to evolve it into something that everyone can stand a chance of adopting. Getting opinions from the wiser audience in terms of questionnaires and polls (plenty of free survey systems out there) could gain valuable information as well as useful suggestions you might not have thought of!
Again, I know it’s community-driven, but the community isn’t "visible" on the homepage (again, I get that there’s a link - you know what I mean). You have to dig around to see activity or come to the forums to make suggestions when there could be polling happening on the homepage for example (I realise of course that by now my version of the homepage would have everything under the sun on it

).
Going to those links you provided (cheers for that), not everyone is going to look at Jira, because it won’t make much sense to non-technical people, same with SVN like I said earlier - much of the user-base for MODx know the basics to install the software, tweak the templates a bit and write some content - not everyone’s a developer. The other links were useful though, thanks.
The impresion I sometimes get viewing these forums is something along the lines of "if you’ve used it, you’ll understand why it’s the best" (and at present it is the best without a doubt for my complex needs), but that’s the stumbling block - there could be
more people testing and adopting it if the homepage had a little more action on it. I know it’s had x-hundred-thousand-or-more downloads as well so isn’t exactly unpopular, but what’s the harm in doubling or tripling that in half the time eh?
Think this might be better off split off from this topic now - slightly OT