"Time is not on our side"

As a suggestion, monetary contributions are not the only way to help. If you want to help financially, I am sure some of the modx experts around here, who work with modx for a living, would appreciate leads for contract work. Having clients pay for site development, and having code come out of that, is by far the most expedient way to help the project financially.

Just my $.02

Yes, I agree. I remember that some kind of "professional support" is to be offered by the modx-team. See Manager-Help:

We are planning to offer commercial support services for MODx as well. Please email us if you’re interested.

What about that?
@vbrilon:
The risk of this type of contracting might be that it could direct the dev-resources to very individual, client-specific requirements and thus distract it from being put into product-dev.

Another idea would be to do public fund-raising based on a wishlist:
Users post which features they would like to have, the dev-teams sorts out what does not fit into the architecture. Then users can offer donations for one of those features. And if the sum of those offers exceeds what the team sees as a reasonable price, the feature is implemented and the donations offered have to be made. To avoid abuse it might be necessary to restrict the option of offering donations for a feature to "Member" users or to those who already have made a donation.

Just a somewhat strange idea, but could be funny though ...

EDIT: This mechanism would keep the dev-efforts in relation to a) user-requirements b) user-requirements which are rooted in business. Having numbers of what the user-community would be willing to pay is a more reliable instrument for steering the dev-process than guesses made by the dev-team (which are, inevitably, influenced by personal preferences or interests).

Reverse Bounty?

I was perusing the Drupal forums and found a developer that was testing a reverse bounty. What is this? A reverse bounty is where a developer states a prject he wants to do for a certain bounty. Then, when that amount has been reached via one or more individuals, he creates the program. It is like sponsoring a project or requesting sponsorship for a project.

Chuck

Quote from: ppaul at Jul 24, 2006, 04:14 AM

Yes, I agree. I remember that some kind of "professional support" is to be offered by the modx-team. See Manager-Help:

We are planning to offer commercial support services for MODx as well. Please email us if you’re interested.

What about that?

If you do need professional level support for your modx site, I know of at least 3 or 4 people here who are qualified to do it, and would be interested in doing so. But your point is well taken -- those capabilities need to be advertised better.

Quote from: ppaul at Jul 24, 2006, 04:14 AM

@vbrilon:
The risk of this type of contracting might be that it could direct the dev-resources to very individual, client-specific requirements and thus distract it from being put into product-dev.

Agreed. But at the same time, if dedicated developers have jobs that pay their bills, it makes working on modx-specific features much, much easier in their spare time. Also don’t discount how much innovation can come out of a client project. There’s some *very* cool stuff heading into the modx code very soon that directly came out of a client project that happened to need those features.

I’m talking about funding the project through commercial development as well as developing a more robust core through the use and reuse of the modx CMS and invention of practically applicable modifications.

What would be ideal I believe would be the participation of the community in these projects to speed up the process and blow out the mundane and time consumming aspects. Leaving the founders/coders/testers to do their magic unhindered. Again it’s just a thought I know the logistics of such a thing would be a nightmare, especially since people are not that dependable when they aren’t getting paid.

Gary

Quote from: vbrilon at Jul 24, 2006, 08:11 AM

Also don’t discount how much innovation can come out of a client project. There’s some *very* cool stuff heading into the modx code very soon that directly came out of a client project that happened to need those features.

Good point! However, the client-projects modx can benefit from, are only those who are done by the dev-team or one of its members. Would be great if other modx-users could make their projects advantageous for modx too: by subcontracting the dev-team for core-related changes/enhancements. Something to think about.
In my recent project I had to use Joomla, since modx still misses built-in versioning and multi-language support. In the overall calculations, implementing those features as a part of the project might have made sense, since the dull complexity of J! also generates costs which might outweight extra modx-investments.

Quote from: ppaul at Jul 24, 2006, 08:53 AM

Good point! However, the client-projects modx can benefit from, are only those who are done by the dev-team or one of its members. Would be great if other modx-users could make their projects advantageous for modx too: by subcontracting the dev-team for core-related changes/enhancements. Something to think about.

Excellent point. I think that if someone here has a job they want to sub out to someone from the dev team, with a stipulation that the code has to go back into modx after project completion, I am sure there would be some takers from the dev team. Let me know who has projects

Very nice input guys, I make a mental note to remember this... Yes getting contracts to the dev team is also one way to fund the project, I have a few leads myself that I couldn’t do (out of my skill range) and asked the dev team if they would be interrested. So far, nothing came out of it but I sure intend to do it as much as I can in the future.

One thing I am counting on too is having the companies I get contract from sponsoring modules, plugin or snippet development and have them release with an open source licence as much as possible. A way to give back to the community and the dev team

Anyway, continue to shoot ideas, that’s great