Some General Principles

[jmcgin51]

@izal - your points are not entirely invalid, and many of them have been made before.

One thing that struck me as I read your post was the number of times you referred to "you" and "your product" and "your team".  While I know you were targeting the dev & support teams specifically, it could be argued that this being an open-source GPL'd project, it is as much "yours" (Izal's) as anyone else's.  When it becomes "our" project instead of "your" project, it's amazing what can happen.  An sense of ownership makes a huge difference.

What Ted (or anyone else) does with his time is quite frankly none of your concern, unless he's under contract to you.  If he chooses to walk away from this project tomorrow, that's entirely his prerogative.  If there are enough people here who are proud of this package and who call it "ours", it will survive with or without Ted, the dev team, the support team, the documentation team, etc.

So, all of that said, where are YOU (specifically you, Izal), offering to contribute?  From some of your other posts, it's clear you have some level of programming skill.  Perhaps you could work on fleshing out areas of the "For developers" pages in the wiki.  Or you can appoint yourself to be the "noob welcome committee", and guide newcomers through the steps of getting started, managing expectations, etc.

[Izal]

At some point in the not too distant future this may be a possibility and contribution wise, I don't know, it depends on if I can come up with.

In the mean time, it wouldn't hurt to discuss and come up with some kind of noob trainee recruitment scheme to inject new blood in to the system.

[Dr.CSS]

Again, appointing people is not an option, as everyone is a volunteer and they are all currently busy trying to make a living, some times it includes using CMS Made Simple other times they have what you might call day jobs unrelated to CMS Made Simple...

To say things like make this or do that doesn't work in an open source software environment as it is free and so are the ones making it and using it, I'm sorry if the READ ME FIRST seems like a bunch of arbitrary rules but from my experience and time I've been on this forum it really does help to state what environment you are running it on and any other pertinent information you are asked for...

Fell free to improve the wiki or answer questions in the forum at any time...

[replytomk3]

We have run across this issue a few times before and here it comes again. With the increasing popularity of CMSMS, more and more new people will arrive and populate the forum with same issues again and again.

This is an unavoidable effect of the increasing popularity of CMSMS.

The question I wish to ask is whether other people on this forum are aware of this fact, and are comfortable with people choosing CMSMS over a template, or a much more basic CMS, with the side effect of so much preexisting set of skills to be able to use CMSMS.

For the unconvinced, I would like to point your attention to the Firefox forums as the absolute horror story. The stupid forum software on their end, no sticky topics, no search, and possibly (just a claim) just end users helping end users, all combine to an unusable help resource.

[SMF]

I read some of the "demands" with dismay - do the posters realize how childish they sound?
Preface the following with IMNSHO
"Free Open Source" is not "Open Source", the difference is critical (do yourselves a favor and look it up).
"Free" means "Free as in speech" - not just gratis. That's the thing people put a lot of commitment into. Not free as in "free to demand". Developed to "scratch an itch" means developed to fill a niche. FOSS projects that survive and prosper do so because they are quality products in demand.

Attracting "users" is easy. Attracting developers (and documenters, and testers) necessary to build and maintain a decent product is hard . Developers need to concentrate on - developing, not hand-holding.

There are any number of similar products, *cough* Jumbo, that promise "simple" web site production. You cannot have a product that produces clean, legal, code *and* is highly configurable *and* is "easy" to learn. If legal code and configurablity (without needed dozens of dodgy extensions) isn't important, then nothing one creates will be either.
Like anything else - the more you know, the more you can do... If people won't or can't read the documentation, and do the learning - they will always be "desigars".

If you can't spell - learn. If you can't be bothered reading Calguy's not-always-gentle help guides then you really can't expect help. There's no point in reinventing the wheel - there are many sites with good learning material for want-to-be web site designers.
(I believe) Calguy is dumbing it down when he lists the needed knowledge - add font, colour, content layout, and ,*nix, knowledge, + search skills, and literacy to the list if you really want to make good sites.

That said - CMSMadeSimple is still one of the best products to start your learning. You *don't* need to know PHP but a basic knowledge of what it is, and how it works is helpful.

And if some one's only contribution is to demand or complain... try SiteBuilder or similar - and demand your money's worth. Sincerely to the web site building newbies - if you calculate the time you spend learning CMSmadesimple in dollars you'll come out ahead compared to what it will cost you with the commercial alternatives. If you really feel strongly that CMSmadesimple doesn't give newbies enough support *please* contribute - you can bet there are many other who would greatly appreciate your work, you'll learn useful skills *and* do a job the people you make demands on can't do as well as you. Do you remember learning to ride a bike? - it took weeks before you could steer and pedal.

And thanks to TOP - it really should be one of the first things people see.

--- Get off my lawn! ;-p

[uniqu3]

Welcome kiwilist.

You are in CMS Made Simple forum, do not be surprised if the only answer you will get is "CMS Made Simple".