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
GDrive Spreadsheet

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

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?