Hi ?,

It might be a bit of a chicken & egg problem, but I believe it wouldn't make much sense to outline groups without having several active member to put into them.

How do you envision that outlining an organization chart will make the community more active?

Our approach is very different from many other CMSes. We try to integrate everything you need into the core. So I'm not surprised you don't see millions of plugins and plugin developers. For 95% of wordpress plugins, there's no need for a plugin in b2evo.

-Francois.

@fplanque. It would be nice to see a organizational chart of all the active role-players for b2evolution though. I see many folks asking for help and advice, but only few responding. That alone must place quite a strain on the devs. Does the b2evo team have any future action plans to stimulate and promote skin and plugin development?

"95% of wordpress plugins" sounds a little off (: But yeah maybe like 80% for the "average blogger". For advanced solutions the plugins & themes still lack very much.
I'am halfway there for creating a framework for extensions (both themes&plugins) but i'm stuck at certain points and i dont seem to find solutions to them. I know it's a long way to remake the Manual & the docs, but during my research i've found out they are still far from complete.

Even the test.plugin itself is a BIG help. We need more examples & tutorials like that to understand how everything works, and which functions and hooks we can make use of.

Once /and if/ i am able to complete that framework i mentioned, it'll be very easy for me to create / port tens of plugins and/or themes quickly. I hope, i'll be able to accomplish that in the upcoming weeks when i find time from clients, projects and other stuff. I like b2 and would like to continue use it for years to come, but it's not highest priority for me right now personally.

As for the "group" thing, i dont think it's necessary at this point. Even in the most active days of community, we had 20-something developers/mods, and 5-10 people on the #IRC. Since then things have changed you know, and it'd be completely useless IMO. Forums are your best bet for almost anything; support, finding extensions, discussion whatever.

I guess we don't need to have hundreds of people in every groups considering almost all of the release of B2evo is pretty much stable.

But come to think of this, what if we have a group who develops/creates FREE b2evo skins and would release at least one Skin every month. That group might have 2 leads and 4-5 members. That's only 7 people who whill share one working skin every month.

More skins lead to possible questions among its users and those unanswered questions will be raised in the forum.

Going back to the question of fplanque,

"How do you envision that outlining an organization chart will make the community more active?"

Simple answer. Creating a group is like building a sense of responsibility and duty among its members to provide help whenever a query falls within their scope.

I mean, let's accept the fact that if someone will post a question in the community forum, it will take 24 hours or even more before someone takes time to answer it. But if we have a group, I am positive that we can eliminate this.

Looking at the business side of it, the hosting services ran and managed by B2EVO team will flourish and gain more clients since an active community is an eye candy for those who are not yet using b2vo cms and its services.