Wow! Quite a lot has happened in the Dotclear community recently. Let me try to sum it all up for you.

On July 9th, Franck, who had been in charge of Dotclear since February, around the time when version 2.5 came out, decided to leave and slam the door on his way out.

While he was full of hopes, projects and enthusiasm, the community didn't follow. Team members, from lack of either time or eagerness, were less and less available. The new projects he announced (redesign the admin interface, replace the wysiwyg editor by something more advanced, give the Dotclear and Dotaddict websites a fresh look...) weren't enough to drive the team. Most of all, Franck missed what was for him the most important in Dotclear: the conviviality and team spirit. So Franck was quitting, and what would happen to Dotclear?

The door slamming certainly did one thing: suddenly, the community awoke.

People started talking, on Twitter and the Dotclear blog more particularly. On July 10th, Kozlika started outlining three possible futures for the project.

The first possibility is that a number of new, motivated and energetic developers (and, more generally speaking, contributors of all sorts) join Dotclear. The problem hasn't so much to do with money, marketing or communication, but mostly with contributions. With a vibrant community, there is no doubt that Dotclear can find its second wind.

The second possibility is to focus on simply keeping Dotclear afloat. No major changes, no projects for new features, simply a small team of developers, testers and webmasters devoted to fixing bugs and updating the code with new versions of PHP.

The third possibility is to slowly move to a close. Take the time (one or two years) to help users migrate towards new solutions, to ask the developers of other CMS for migration plugins, and so forth. This only requires a small team of people, with few programming skills, for a short time.

Then Kozlika opened the discussion on the dev mailing list. Everyone, independently of skills, was invited to join. Dozens and dozens of people did. Hundreds of messages were exchanged. Looks like Dotclear's not quite dead yet...

... And, indeed, we're releasing a new version !

Thanks to the wonderful community, changes are coming. Stay tuned for further updates!