Quo vadis, DokuWiki?
Is DokuWiki dead?
- development activity seems to have decreased at lot
- nearly no communication on the Mailing List
- long term developers seem to have lost interest/time (myself included)
- no new developers join (or we are shit at integrating them into our community)
Is that even true?
- I gathered some numbers to see if my feeling is right
Numbers!
- Data from 2011 til today
- 2015 is not complete, so it's somewhat skewed
- graphs show rolling 5 month averages
- trend line is linear (whatever that means ;-P)
- basically up is good, down is bad
Development
- some development related graphs first…
- remember this is all quantity, not quality
Commits
Mailing List Posts
IRC Messages
New Plugins
Development Summary
- commit count has decreased
- but not as much as the communication has
- most communication now happens in github comments
- which I didn't count (sorry)
- does anyone remember when we moved to github?
- Plugin creation slightly decreases
- understandibly - most common problems are solved
Endusers
- let's see how end user related numbers changed
Forum Posts
Newsletter
Sessions
End User Numbers
- Forum posts are down, mostly to the loss of developers chiming in (I think)
- Newsletter subscriptions got a huge bump with download.dokuwiki.org being introduced
- People are interested still!
- we need to use this huge potential better!
- Sessions are slightly growing
- yeah! fighting the trend
Is it even our fault?
- it reflect the interest in wikis in general: Google trends
Time to speculate
- DokuWiki feels finished
- Keeping backwards compatibility and existing users happy
- requires high skill
- makes adding new “hot” features difficult
- We're not exactly modern PHP
- existing developers are gatekeepers but have limited time/interest
- PRs do not get enough attention
Can we just be done?
- There are challenges ahead:
- PHP7 compatibility
- HHVM support
- We want to keep up with modern times and deliver what users expect from a modern wiki
- there are still open devel:ideas
- so no, we're not done!
Ideas - Tools
- Rethinking our tools
- are mailing lists still the tool of choice?
- should our IRC chat be more accessible?
- what are the cool kids using?
- Rethinking our development process
- I'm not sure how exactly to solve this
- how to get code integrated faster without sacrificing quality?
- would a merge now, fix later attitude be helpful?
Ideas - Community
- Splitting off modules that are of broader interest to the PHP community
- using composer to pull them back in
- Who should have commit access who still hasn't?
- How do we notice new people?
- why aren't they here?
And now?
- Ideas anyone?
- Need a group hug?
