Standing on the Edge of Tomorrow
I am very pleased and quite joyful to be writing this post. Rarely in the life of a software project are such pivotal and fundamentally transformational choices made. Over the course of the last few months, I have spent most of my time talking to community members, consulting with our Varien team and researching various topics related to Magento’s development and how to best handle our rapid growth.
Currently, the magentocommerce.com site is the focal point of everything--information, interaction and everything in between. It is Magento’s home on the web, Varien’s business channel, and bundled within it a community site, which includes the bug tracker interface and forums, along with documentation and a variety of other vehicles for accomplishing many things. The original conception and creation of the site was fantastic during the early stages and has been the backbone of everything that has helped us accomplish a tremendous amount, reach awesome milestones and to grow rapidly and dynamically.
Reflecting on the past is fun, but what is more exciting is looking towards the future!
The activity around Magento is exploding and it is highly exciting to be talking about how to continue to manage this growth. We believe this can and should be done through the lowering of barriers to getting involved. Varien wants to facilitate this as much as possible and through talking with many community members, it’s clear to see that many possess a true passion to contribute. We are very eager to integrate these elements of our community in a fruitful way. In looking to ensure the continued dynamism, success and growth of Magento, what we have discussed and agreed on is a proposal for sweeping changes to key systems and processes that will make collaboration easier and more transparent. Hopefully, when effectively executed, these enhancements will give everyone more of what they want and promote even greater growth with an increased ability to channel contributions into the right paths.
In general, we would like to establish and implement a new platform, a true community built and community driven platform in which we can enable people to contribute with limited impediment. Specifically, we would like to aim to put whatever contributions come in into some sort of workflow, provide for some method of tracking and notification which is conducive to productivity and all the while ensure that data, information and tools are out there and available for anyone looking to use them beneficially.
So how do we plan on accomplishing this? This is where your voice counts.
First, there are a few areas in which we want to focus our efforts initially, based on feedback from you. Mainly, those are source code management related, QA related including bug submission, tracking and notification, documentation related mostly focusing on wiki and user-contributed docs, also included in this is some feed aggregation and finally communication including mailing lists, forums and related methods. For all of these areas we would like your thoughts on which tools work and which don’t. Is there anything you have used or seen in use on previous projects which has worked well or is there anything you prefer that was used? We want the community to feel comfortable with these tools and therefore we would like your input on them.
Second, after we collecting suggestions, We are pulling to put together our next Community Advisory Board meeting within two weeks to discuss the suggestions from the community and options and put together a plan and a task force to put the plan into action. The task force will include CAB members and members of the community. Man power is one thing you can never have enough of and anyone with technical ability who would like to help us set up whatever solution(s) we decide on is encouraged and more than welcome to contact me so that we can link up and figure out the best possible way to help.
I am optimistic about this. Once we decide on a solution, we will definitely be looking towards the community for help on putting the pieces of the puzzle of our new growth-oriented infrastructure together. After that is up and running we can focus our attention on any remaining issues of policy and trying to figure out where we can tear down walls there as well. We are already blazing a trail and the more momentum we can build and channel will help to make Magento and our community an unstoppable force in the eCommerce revolution.
I look forward to reading your comments and suggestions and engaging everyone in dialogue and the work thereafter. As always, feel free to email me, .
Koby 
1Shine Marketing |posted May 27 2009
Great to see you putting gtood infrastructure in place to manage feedback & growth.
One thing I’ve found useful on another project is this tool for users to suggest & vote on new features or priorities:
http://uservoice.com/
Might be worth a look.
Moving solutions to the Wiki will also be good rather than having to trawl the forums, and maybe closing resolved threads with links to the solution, but the Wiki needs indications of what version the advice relates to.
We’re growing nicely now and may have some capacity to assist in the near future.
2Jan Brašna from Pilsen/Prague, CZ|posted May 27 2009
The current issue tracking doesn’t work well for finding bugs, filing bits of code etc., it’s filled with duplicates and general stuff that should be in forums instead of jillions of scattered tickets in the issue tracking system, generally it’s hard to keep on top of it and to contribute.
Trac has proven to be quite useful for OSS w/ big, involved, community.
As for the source code management, maybe Git/Github might also be the way to go, but I find it still rather geeky.
For the documentation wiki, there should be a way to mark Magento versions that the bits of the content relate to - nowadays the wiki content is rather outdated with no hint what parts need to be updated and with no warning for the newcomers that the content is obsolete.
Oh, and the whole MagentoCommerce.com site should support Unicode, it breaks a lot of rich typography, accents, code snippets etc. ...
3JasonLee from San Francisco, CA|posted May 27 2009
I have noticed that the wiki is fairly outdated, especially with regards to the screenshots. Now that I am fairly comfortable with Magento, initially during my learning process it was very difficult trying to match up the wiki screenshot with what version I was working with.
Also, I agree with Stephen that closing forum posts that are resolved and linking to a wiki document with the real solution would save a lot of people time reading through the entire forum discussion and just read the solution.
To touch on the Source Code Management (SCM) - I have been in the process of implementing SVN in house because of many issues of touching one thing in an XML file kills the entire store or checkout process and it is very hard to track down. I would have implemented GIT, but my main CSS developer (which doesn’t know PHP or programming) uses Panic Coda which only integrates with SVN. I am not making it any harder on the designer than it has to be.
I also agree with Jan that the current issue tracking is filled with duplicates and are incorrectly prioritized / categorized. Part of this problem is that designers and programmers have completely different views on things and put different bugs in different places - or think something is a bug when it is not.
Also, to reiterate Jan’s statement of “there should be a way to mark Magento versions [in the wiki] that the bits of content relate to”. I have run into many obsolete articles in the wiki that took me days or weeks to realize were outdated because I was new to Magento.
4thE_iNviNciblE from Oldenburg|posted May 27 2009
"The current issue tracking doesn’t work well for finding bugs, filing bits of code etc., it’s filled with duplicates and general stuff that should be in forums instead of jillions of scattered tickets in the issue tracking system, generally it’s hard to keep on top of it and to contribute. “
i can confirm Jan Brasna ...
we need a least a email notification while we are maybe try to help other people on the bugtracker.
And another cool function would be a “Vote” Option where you can say “Up” and “Down” - the Comunity could descide which Bugs are importend out there ...
5monocat from Los Angeles, CA|posted May 27 2009
I second the use of http://uservoice.com. I had tweeted about it before to @magento.
Also, before anything else, I believe overhaul of import/export must be implemented.
As much as I love magento and using it, now I am in a conundrum of sort when it comes to trying to “personalize” a product. Custom options are not import/exportable, so that’s out, purchased EasySKU to go the route of attributes, well come to find out the whole system slows down, we’re talking about “not wanna shop there” load time since the main product has to communicate with 100s of simple products (757 in my case). Tried the bundle purchase, but of course the custom options don’t transfer when in a bundle or group… so pretty much standing at a complicated fork with no proper direction.
I believe that should be NUMBER 1.
6monocat from Los Angeles, CA|posted May 27 2009
@JasonLee. I don’t trust the Wiki. One too many times I have seen updates from VERY ANGRY USERS. I had to unfortunately report on on one of them to make sure they didn’t muddle up the instructions. I say more secured Wiki, maybe even users who have to pass a test of some sort and can only access with special login. For others it will be set as Read-Only.
7thE_iNviNciblE from Oldenburg|posted May 27 2009
@monocat: “I second the use of http://uservoice.com.”
try these demo to look at it http://initech.uservoice.com/pages/1155-initech it supports different bug states and a limited number of possible “votes” ...
another bugtrack system could be ... its open source and could be installed on a magento server…
http://www.mantisbt.org/ -> DEMO http://www.mantisbt.org/demo/my_view_page.php
it supports -> Roadmap , Own Dashboard, eMail Comments (with many rule options… magento developer could be divided in diferent groups and setup their own Email Channels, taging but missing a voteing option…
you can relate bugs to each other to minimize duplicates and so on…
you can also can get a overview about performance as Graph and also as Freemind (see relations)
i love mantis
8monocat from Los Angeles, CA|posted May 27 2009
@thE_iNviNciblE: Initech.
Thanks for the mantisbt link.
9Koby Oz |posted May 27 2009
Hey Everyone,
Thanks for the excellent feedback. We realize that there are many limitations right now, but the goal is not to focus on them, because we all know them, but to focus on the tools which we can use to put together a beefed up infrastructure. If we use a forwarding looking mind set, we can accomplish much more and more quickly. Just want to make sure everything goes smoothly and as constructively and as additively as possible.
Koby
10Jan Brašna from Pilsen/Prague, CZ|posted May 27 2009
Oh, I totally forgotot — If you don’t like the Trac way (and, please, no Mantis, it’s as evil as Bugzilla is…), there are two great apps for SVN + issue tracking, that are particularly open for OSS projects:
http://warehouseapp.com/
http://lighthouseapp.com/
11akirsch |posted May 27 2009
Would recommend JIRA by atlassian for project tracking/bugs.
http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/
12thE_iNviNciblE from Oldenburg|posted May 27 2009
Bugzilla is evil!!
Only the Mantis Template looks really bad!!
- Different Versions!!
- But under the hood SOAP API (PHP / .NET), Wiki (Mediawiki),
- SVN support (http://www.grafxsoftware.com/option.php/182/)
- Relation of Bugs (+ Analyse)
- Wiki Support
- Roadmap
http://warehouseapp.com/
http://lighthouseapp.com/
looking great but missing functionality…
I think magento needs a tool for the feature… i know a “login ready infrastructure” could be really quickly used but allways with limitations about the feature set…
another system i want to mention is http://otrs.org/
13|pez| from Norway|posted May 28 2009
Wikis are great for documentation. But the wiki that’s on this site is horribly unstructured, and it’s honestly not all that easy to find what we’re looking for.
Wikis need a structure. And to me it doesn’t feel like the Magento Wiki has one, at all. The Wiki Homepage is uneditable, and it does not really give the user anything other than some featured articles, which may or may not be what they’re looking for.
Personally, I like the WordPress wiki. ( http://codex.wordpress.org/ )
It has lots of stuff on the frontpage, neatly categorized into different sections. From beginnerguides to more advanced stuff.
I think a wikidocumentation would benefit from Varien supplying atleast a list of module and themedevelopment functions. Wouldn’t need to have all information about the functions themselves, but it’d probably make it easier for the community to know where to fill in the blanks in the documentation. WordPress documentation is also a good example here; categorize the functions by what they’re handling - http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference
Ofcourse, Magento is a more complex system than WordPress, but it should really not be too hard to make a structure that works for Magento and its community.
In all honesty, I’m also not too keen on seeing unrelated information on the documentationwiki. I’m not interested in seeing the ad for the book, jobboards, twitter, or the proffesional services. It’s annoying and disturbing elements which should be removed.
14SeL from Paris, France|posted May 29 2009
As previously said, a structured wiki is very important IMHO.
And as a french community member i would like to have also a wiki able to manage localized articles. I guess german, dutch and all other non english speaking communities would agree.
I know MediaWiki manages this : http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
The advantage of this is that you can browse the wiki articles and if there is a french version, you can read it if you feel more comfortable with it.
As i already said several times, i think it would be great to have international homepages with the most important links to :
* download page
* local (french or german or...) forum
* translation
* etc.
We will talk about this at the Bargento event in Paris on Tuesday and will come back to you with french community feedback
15Armen from Los Angeles|posted June 1 2009
Please, PLEASE change the bug tracking system to allow us to look up bugs by bug number. I am baffled by the lack of this feature in the bug tracking system.
I read through the release notes for new releases and when I see a bug that I want to know more about, I want to look up the issue in the system so I can read more than just the name. However it is nearly impossible to easily pull up the issues listed in the release notes in the issue tracking system. There is no way to use the number to go directly to the bug. Doing a keyword search using the full title listed in the release notes usually fails as well.
Allow us to look up issues by the numbers assigned to them.
16Gabriiiel from France - Paris|posted June 7 2009
Hi everybody,
Uservoice is a useful tool. But what about an integrated solution ? I mean, something that would be a part of the magentocommerce.com website, I’m sure it exists, and the source code of the bug tracker could be a “starter point”. What we need is a very simple system that allows user to post their ideas, with categories, and the other user should be able to give their point of view - so it would be a “uservoice” like system, but into the current website.
Concerning the wikis, MediaWiki is great, with customisations (especially concerning the design). We would have a structured wiki, it would be great…
But we need to thing about some other elements :
- we also need a “tutorials” part, it would use wikis articles but with a better design (if the user wants to change the tutorials, then he changes the wiki article and someone would change the tutorial source code according to the wiki article recent changes)
- the bug tracker needs more reaction from Varien team, not just status changes, but words, we need someone to write “ok guys, we’ll do it” (or not)
Concerning french community, we have lots of great projects. It doesn’t concern directly this blog post, but hopefully we will have a discussion about that with SeL, Koby, myself and all the community members on Fragento.org !