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Don't get me wrong, I'm all for community involvement and all for good ideas that will help get more community involvement, and applaud your initiative. But (of course, there's a but) basically you're suggesting that
- people with a little bit of skill and a lot of good ideas
- from anywhere and everywhere
- work together to create a new core feature/module
- without anything material in return
I think it's an awesome idea! And after carefull consideration I've found a name that will fit perfectly for this: open source XOOPS development!
You will have to excuse my sarcasm, it isn't meant to offend anyone, least of all you Bandit-x. But you described the ideal way open source software gets developed, including XOOPS.
The QA team and core developers already are judges for the quality of the result of the work done, but alas the work done is mostly by them (I say alas, because ideally the work should be done by lots and lots of people).
The main problem seems to be access to the pool of high quality skills to be able to realise the complex and advanced architecture and implement all the ideas in a coherent and efficient whole. And in my humble opinion, holding a contest the way you propose will not activate the pool of professional-level skills that the XOOPS development needs at the moment.
We need people who can show by example how things should be coded, who can analyse the boatloads of great ideas and wishes for features and create from that a generic, efficient and advanced set of features that will be scalable, extensible, object oriented and up-to-date, as well as easy to use for both developers and end-users.
Having said all this, I want to point out that your idea certainly has a lot of merit. If not for core development (and the quality of modules needs to be at the same level if we want to advance to the next level), then perhaps we should focus on what the majority is good at: being end-users and webmasters.
XOOPS is more then development and design, it's being *used* extensively too. I'd like a community contest to focus on that part:
- webmaster and end-user documentation
- how-to's, tutorials
- usability testing
- accessibility tests and proposals
- w3c standards compliance proposals
- module packs
- theme packs
- Language files (spelling, wording)
Every little bit we can add to this field will help XOOPS get the first place next year in any number of awards and elections. Propose changes in code or guidelines on how to implement certain features based on all our experience as users. Write documentation you yourself sorely missed when you got started with XOOPS. (one thing that I am really ashamed of is that after 4 years, the XOOPS installler still ends the installation process with 'How to use: [not yet]').
It's these areas more then development that the community can provide a huge contribution IMHO, as it calls for our skills as users of the software. It will elevate the quality of the out-of-the-box use of XOOPS.
I think that about sums it up: using the modules and core we have now, how can we as an active community make an out-of-the-box version of XOOPS that we can be really proud of and want to show to the whole world?
Herko
