Open Source Goals: April - June 2015

Recently the teams at SilverStripe got together to talk about our goals for the next quarter. I'm part of a team focused on working on the SilverStripe CMS and key modules, and we decided on three areas we want to focus on. I'd like to share them with you.

Community Engagement

We want to build up the SilverStripe open source community. One of the ways we can make an impact is to seek out developers new to the framework/CMS and offer our help.
So we're going to search Github issues, talk to the Ops team and listen out for tweets from new SilverStripe developers. When we spot folks who need it, we want to be able to provide meaningful help.

Our hope is that we can inspire new SilverStripe developers to become reliable contributors. We think we can achieve this by removing the obstacles to discovering how awesome SilverStripe is.

Improving How We Improve UX

We're always trying to make the CMS easier to use. But we just don't feel like we have a reusable process for implementing these kinds of improvements.

That's why we're working on a checklist for reviewing, discussing and implementing UX improvements. The improvements aren't just about design, though. The checks we put in place need to work for code improvements and tooling.

In time, we hope that this work can filter through to the rest of SilverStripe. We want to set an example for other teams, when they run into the same bottlenecks.

Release More Often, Release More Open

There are a lot of hoops to jump through to release new versions of framework and CMS. We're conscious of how difficult the process is, and we want to make it easier. We want to simplify and publish the steps to release new versions of these.

We think this will help us to release more often. We can't automate away all the steps, but there's much we can do to speed them up.

We also want to involve external contributors in future releases. These are open-source projects and core contributors should be able to release new versions.

Get Involved

If you'd like to see some of the CMS features we're working on, check out our visual roadmap. We're making steady progress towards 3.2 and 4.0. If you'd like to know more about reporting issues or requesting new features, check out this community page.