December 2009 CAB Meeting Notes
Our December 2009 CAB meeting took place last Thursday the 17th. It was a long meeting, but fairly productive and we discussed a number of issues at great length. On the agenda were the following issues:
- Welcoming New CAB Member Matt Blackwell
- New Section of Magento Site for CAB and Contributors
- New Magento Wiki and Magento Community Documentation Team Efforts
- Magento Community Edition Roadmap and Selection of Features/Feature Requests
- Magento Github and Weekly Builds Coming Soon
Welcoming New CAB Member Matt Blackwell
Matt Blackwell of Company Fifty Two wrote to us a while back about possibly re-working some portions of the wiki and starting an effort to create, manage and organize community contributed documentation for Magento. Matt was offered a possible seat on the CAB to help drive those efforts and all CAB members approved. Matt will start off 2010 rallying efforts around updating, editing and adding additional “Get Help For This Page” special pages that are linked to from the Magento Admin. More about the community documentation efforts in the section below. If you would like to join the effort and discussions please join the Magento Docs Google Group.
New Section of Magento Site for CAB and Contributors
We are working on a new section of the Magento site which will act as a hub for community contributions and those looking to contribute. The new section will feature a page dedicated to the Community Advisory Board with profiles of each member and contact information, meeting archives,notes and more information on upcoming activity. Another page will be devoted to joining the Magento community contribution efforts and offer information on the process of contributing including the Magento Contributor Agreement (PDF), various community initiatives that you can contribute to such as code, documentation, QA, etc., links to resources for contributors, links to collaboration tools, such as forums, a blog aggregator, mailing lists and discussions groups. We will also have a special page highlighting Magento Contributors as a way of thanking members of the community who are active contributors. We are also working on putting together some limited edition gift packages for active contributors.
New Magento Wiki and Magento Community Documentation Team Efforts
A Magento Community Documentation effort has begun to take shape under the leadership and direction of Matt Blackwell. Starting with the special “Help” pages on the Magento wiki that are linked to from the Magento Admin, members of the community will be creating, managing and editing lots of current and new Magento documentation. If you’ve ever wished you could contribute something to the Magento community but didn’t know where to start or aren’t able to contribute code, this is a great way to get started. If you’ve also ever looked for some piece of documentation and found out it didn’t exist or needed to be updated, now you can help create and edit documentation in a directed effort to improve the community’s resources. You could show up on the new Magento Contributors Page! If you are interested in getting more information and joining this effort, please join the Magento Docs Google Group.
Magento Community Edition Roadmap and Selection of Features/Feature Requests
The Magento Community Edition Roadmap UserVoice Page has been very popular and we appreciate all the feedback from the community. We would like to start selecting features for upcoming versions of Magento Community Edition. A process was discussed in order to make this simple and straightforward. We would like to remove feature requests from the Magento bug tracker completely and have all new features come in through UserVoice. The CAB meetings, starting in January will have some time devoted to selecting a few of the most requested features and presenting them to members of the Magento team. The Magento team will then respond back with a timetable on how long those features will take to be implemented, and if they are feasible. Certain features which can be completed in a timely manner by the Magento team will be marked and others that cannot be completed quickly or would be easier for the community to develop will be noted as such as well. Following this process, the CAB will review those results and select the features that seem the most mutually agreeable and doable and present those as the next version of the roadmap.
Magento Github and Weekly Builds Coming Soon
Many have requested that some sort of code tracking be set up in order to be able to watch and track Magento development for those interested in submitting patches or developing extensions. We are in the process of preparing a Github instance with weekly trees for tracking and that should be available shortly in the new year. The account is already established, we are just waiting for Github to provide us with additional resources and we can start syncing trees.
The meeting was very productive overall and as you can see, we have many great initiatives going on and many new ideas for 2010. If you have any feedback, please sound off in the comments below and as always, email me at . I would like to personally thank our over 120,000 community members for the great successes of 2009 and for supporting us on Magento’s journey to become the world’s fastest growing and best Open Source eCommerce platform. Happy Holidays!
Koby
@dimmenso search for Magento user group on linkedin. Over 2000+ members
