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?

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?

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?