Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community

Hi Sergiu, Thanks for the interesting story :) * How can we help speed up the growth of the community? Continue doing this brilliant work you do. And ... * How can we attract more developers outside XWiki SAS? ... here's a list of some ideas (might contain crazy ones) * First thing is to bring more users (see http://www.google.com/trends?q=xwiki%2C+foswiki%2C+twiki%2C+confluence ) among which new developers shall emerge * At many points XWiki is more powerful than Confluence, outline them * You have to populate the knowledge about XWiki to the Community * If you want to attract developers, advertize among developers * Advertize with features developers and development teams like * Probably advertize XWiki (sourceforge, apache, codehaus) through ads * Try to convince Apache (or at least projects within Apache you have close relations with), Codehaus etc. to host it's numerous docs on XWiki * XWiki functionality as a document storage is more than sufficient. Build more applications on top of it (e.g. agile tools, project management tools) to attract more users. (another e.g. we try to use XWiki for storing all the knowledge about our project, including meetings, user stories etc. It would be nice to bring in some agile features like meeting minutes, product backlog, integration with Jira) * Ability to build applications on top of XWiki is its main advantage you have to extend and advertise to a wide community. * If I owned a software development company I'd send my developers/managers/architects for internship on XWiki for 3-6 iteration cycles to learn all that cool things you do. Maybe I'm not the only one? Some concerns * Main XWiki competitor is Confluence * Unfortunately for XWiki, when one buys Jira - he's likely to buy Confluence * Now is the moment, of truth, XWiki either becomes popular, or vanishes in the fight with Confluence (which might start or already started receiving features from XWiki) * I really hope that XWiki.org will survive not to be either bought by or turn into a commercial company (like Compass and EHCache were somewhere in the past). It so demotivating for the open-source committer that someone has used his hard and volunteer work to get richer. Some major points from the story below * SearchEngineOptimization matters (http://www.google.com.ua/search?q=wiki+engine) * Project Homepage UI matters * Project UI matters (and currently its good, keep an eye on it ;) ) * Ease of installation matters * Ease of configuration / Hot configuration (ability to change smth without restarting the server) matters. And currently its the way you go (plugin management module) * Modularity / Extensibility (with numerous plug-ins) matter * Community (those who are able to support you) matter * Documentation / Tutorials matter (thanks for the numerous docs on how to setup and tune XWiki) * How easy you input your information matters (WYSIWYG + Document import rock!) * Healthy development process matters * Being heard by the community is nice * Frequent feature-fruitful releases are nice THE STORY BELOW Now I will tell you my story of getting addicted to XWiki. We required a wiki for our project and from all of the available choices we initially took FOS Wiki. However having an experience with Attassian Confluence, I neither liked the UI nor syntax. Being a Java developer (Tomcat/JBoss) I as well hated complex installation of that wiki itself as well as plug-ins for it. The structure of that wiki was hard to understand. Funny to mention but most of all I hated how it formats the Java code :) Soon after we started using FOS Wiki, having that heavy feeling of something isn't right I did a quick final random poke for other open-source frameworks (preferably Java, where I could develop the feature I miss or patch the bug I find). I must say that XWiki was far not the first one I found but ... I was conquered with sweet-as-a-candy design of XWiki site (Toucan Skin at that moment). So I quickly downloaded the installer, set it up on my local machine and started getting more and more astonished with the nice features XWiki provided. Just to name few * It had more logical (or at least more obvious) organization of documents * Eye-pleasing UI * Easy installation * A ton of plugins and extension * All was configurable and in many cases even from UI without the need to restart the server Hell, I was even capable to hack (patch) the code colorer library to use styles I wanted (later was added as config parameter)! * The syntax 2.0 was nice (again, thanks for the recent emoticons feature :) ) and the code from WYSIWYG editor came out clean and shining. * ... and logical addition is the Word documents import (no more download/edit/reupload attachments!!!) That was EXACTLY what I was looking for! And then I've learned programming abilities of XWiki which made me totally convinced that it's the most advanced open source wiki tool available. I have subscribed to the mailing list, and followed how the process of development was organized. It was another pleasant surprise. Starting from the ability to participate in decisions like voting for/discussing UI/Code enhancements and ending with how often the releases were made and how well iterative time-boxed approach was applied (especially taking into account that team is distributed). Modular structure (obviously inspired by close relationships with Maven ;) ) of the project and how well it has been architected for modularity deserves separate words. From development point of view, your project is Perfect. It would be very nice for a junior developer, junior software architect, junior PM to work in such team to get that knowledge. So one thing you could do is to establish a sort of courses for developers from other companies. The community turned out to be responsive and I was able to solve any issue I had with XWiki (quite few I must say). I also like the amount and quality of various documentation (from user to development guides) that helped me a lot not to post dummy FAQs on users mailing list. Being so fond of XWiki why wouldn't I become a constantly available contributor? In my case the factors are time and inspiration. Most of the time I either come home late and tired or don't have an inspiration. E.g. while I write this message it's far after the midnight on my clock. I would need to be a real geek, to start coding ... whom, I guess, I'm not, like many other XWiki users. However I do feel there are things (above) that are going to attract people. * Is there anybody that would like contribute more / become a committer? I wish my employer would send me for internship on XWiki ;) * Do users believe that a foundation on top of XWiki will help attract more developers? If the foundation will be responsible ONLY for managing donations that would go to donation-driven feature development. But you don't need a whole foundation for it, right? * Do you (the community) think this is a good idea and it would help? It is definitely attractive. Yet code quality might suffer, because employee working for money is different from open source contributor working for beauty * Would you be willing to contribute/donate to the project? Money donation did cross my mind when I opened Sergiu's page :) Well, I try to contribute to XWiki when I have time/inspiration (like this post). Not more nor less. Dear reader, hope you did not get too bored by now. Thanks for reading it all. Regards, Roman -- View this message in context: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/State-of-the-XWiki-Community-tp5919692p59… Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.