Contributing to Revolution and accelerating its ETA [split from UI change thrd]

Actually, as soon as we finish the port of 097 to ext2, CSS stylers and graphic help will be one of the _primary_ needs.Quote from: splittingred at Jan 19, 2008, 07:33 PM

Actually, as soon as we finish the port of 097 to ext2, CSS stylers and graphic help will be one of the _primary_ needs.

+1 for graphic and HTML/CSS help.

Count on me for cross cultural design, i.e: RTL/LTR needs that comes after XHTML/CSS Layout. I assume this topic won’t last to get the possible contributors attracted for all the time, so what about the David’s suggestion after all?

Indeed not many comments about those , thanks MotSmart for noticing !

I think this should be the MODx primary goal to have more people contribute in anyway that they could, see the joomla’s contribution for example, they grow because they have the infrastructure of getting coders, graphic designers attarction!, i see MODx have already attracted many coders, graphic designers (specially when it comes to ease of MODx valid templating & code integration) but simply there is no any self-service available for them yet to use their potentials, I keep an eye on this topic to get the result, even Ryan kicks me out for this lol :-]

About David suggestion (why so few reacts ?), I think it could bring a real benefit to newbies because it would clarify which way to do things.
Another more suggestion : every thing packed in MODx distrib should also be in the repository (QuickEdit, etc), in order to be able to install them later when you didn’t check them at MODx install.

PS: For developpers, don’t forget a "submit a snippet/plugin/module" button.

I think that davidm has the right idea. We need to make the doorway to contribution as easy to find as possible. I look at other projects like WordPress and CakePHP as examples of two very different OS projects that encourage contribution and make it easy to do so. I like that CakePHP asks if you want to donate if you download the software.

As an example as a barrier to contribution, call me stupid or blind but I so seldom use the nav at the top of the site that I didn’t remember that the bug submission link was there and I was asked to submit a patch. Rather than look stupid and ask where to do it I looked around the MODx site for two hours (while enjoying a coffee) trying Trac, Fisheye, and others (all linked from many of the core team’s sigs in the forum only to eventually stumble on it by mistake.

Overall I think that modxcms.com needs an overhaul to streamline the content structure and weed the trash and dead and obsolete. I personally hate the Resources section of the site. I hate trying to find/browse and then having to weed through crap. Who really does A-Z searches (that is solely dependent on the submitter.)

Now that I have complained, I would me more than happy to help make modxcms the best most user friendly site out there so devs will become contributers, newbies will become advocates and clients will become converts.

BTW I am well aware how busy the core team is so all others shout out your skills and lets get cracking and taking MODx from being Most Promising CMS to Hugely Successful Powerhouse that everyone is talking about and clients are asking for!

Cheers,

Jay

I think that a lot of people suffer from the "I don’t know what I can do to help" syndrome and are slightly embarrassed to asked. Also many may not think that they are ’able’ enough or are intimidated by not being an ’expert’ to be of any true help. Maybe if there was a "We need help with..." to-do list people can see how they can help in their own way.

As Seth Godin says, "Everybody’s an expert at something."

Just because you can’t send money or write fancy PHP (I am just getting my balance in PHP) but you can contribute language corrections for non-english lang-files, you can contribute corrections, you can test stuff out and file bugs when things break.

I will say on bug filing that FlySpray is a bit intimidating for people when they first get there. If we could write a friendly introduction to submitting bugs and explain to people what qualifies as a bug, feature request, or security flaw.

You don’t even need to contribute directly to the project but contribute to the marketing or user community, join the forum (redundant to say that here), make a screencast of how to do something in MODx, if you solved a problem and think others may find it useful write it up and put it in the Wiki or translate a wiki article for the language project.

I am not a PHP/MySQL expert but I am would consider myself an HTML/CSS expert (although there are 1000’s more out there) and many in the group by all contributing we can make MODx work.

I don’t know if it could be done but I think that it would be good to do some sort of feet on the street promotion for MODx and to get more developers involved. Not sure how to do it but Etsy.com uses average users who love Etsy to promote it at events and on the street.

Getting people through the door to making improvements no matter how small is the key.

Yay MODx!

Cheers,

Jay

PS: I have had a pot of coffee and only half a bagel so I am pretty wiggy right now

I would be happy to contribute in any way I can (I know CSS, PHP and I’m learning JS). The only problem I have is that my time is split up between wife, studies, work and other projects and I would probably only be able to contribute in fits...

What would help me would be a subsite in the lines of David’s post. Tasks could be assigned to people with a deadline so if nothing happens it could be reassigned to someone else. Something that would be needed in that case is is a coding guideline! Here things like code formatting (tabs/spaces, teniery/if-statements, bracke-placement etc.), basic assumptions on server capabilities (extensions to PHP, PHP-version etc.), code commenting, documentation and things I obviously missed should be outlined in detail. Because most of the existing code is written by a few developers the current state of the code would be a good starting point.

Also a wishlist (moderated by the core team) where new functionality could be requested and voted on would be nice.

I have lately heard a lot of good things about TDD/Agile, but have no experience of it myself and haven’t seen any good examples of it applied to PHP. What I was wondering if the core team has any thoughts about using TDD? I assume (purely guessing here) that it would be possible to do test cases for new enhancements and bugs which in turn should make it easier for contributing developers to know exactly in what way the contributions should work and what input/return values are expected... It would also be a good base for future documentation. If I have completely misunderstood TDD/Agile and if it isn’t as good as I’ve heard feel free to completely ignore this paragraph!

Quote from: carlholmberg at Jan 24, 2008, 03:38 PM

What would help me would be a subsite in the lines of David’s post. Tasks could be assigned to people with a deadline so if nothing happens it could be reassigned to someone else.

MODx Trac (for 097)
http://svn.modxcms.com/trac/tattoo

Something that would be needed in that case is is a coding guideline! Here things like code formatting (tabs/spaces, teniery/if-statements, bracke-placement etc.), basic assumptions on server capabilities (extensions to PHP, PHP-version etc.), code commenting, documentation and things I obviously missed should be outlined in detail. Because most of the existing code is written by a few developers the current state of the code would be a good starting point.

This is already in the works for the MODx 097 Ext/JS side, and probably at some point for the PHP side as well. Good ideas. More to come on this.