Dotclear

As promised, I am back with more news. They're very good.

Among the large number of people who subscribed to the mailing list after our invitation from July 10, many came firmly intending to contribute their little (or large) brooks of skills and ideas to the Dotclear river. Even better, they didn't just say so: they did it.

The first week after the (re)birth of the mailing list was, how to put it... intense. Between 200 and 380 emails per day; multiple different topics; newcomers to Dotclear (and to mailing lists, their uses, customs, and ancestral traditions) and hardcore coders; very short term plans and visions for the centuries to come. We have used and abused a framapad page to throw around ideas, and little by little an organisation around different poles emerged^[1]:

• development;
• animation and creation of content for the numerous websites of the Dotclear/Dotaddict galaxy;
• Internet presence management (social networking and others);
• events to organize or to which to participate;
• design update of the website and other work around the html/css/js toys.

We have opened a public Trello space where each of us was able to indicate which "cards" s/he joined. To this day, we are 36 contributors registered for one or more current or future tasks. From the magic-dev to the two-left-hands, there's work for everybody to do. The first quick and visible results have been the short time period between the beginning of testing and the publication of version 2.5.1, thanks to the daily feedback from the list members and forum users.

We also regularly chats in IRC meetings (irc.freenode.net #dotclear), every Monday evening at 8pm for the code and Thursday evening at 8pm for the design and integration, occasionally on other topics, continuously for those who login with their morning coffee and log out from their pillow.

A few brilliant or wild ideas have been welcomed and will be studied, a few modest and seriously effective ideas have been adopted. It is too early to know whether this dynamic will stand the test of time, but my personal impression (and Kozlika's as well) is that it will be the case. We will nevertheless have to pay attention to avoid our favorite guilty pleasure: that we bite off more than we can chew, and that one of us begins the ascent of the Annapurna without a single sherpa to their side.

Over the summer, each one of the five topics listed above will be developed in more details on this blog. It's not too late to come play with us, we'll make space!

Let me add here that while the team exchanges in French, there are many English speakers in the community, including on the forums and on IRC. Feel free to ask questions, test development versions, report bugs, and tell us that you love Dotclear!