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Excuse my relative ignorance of the XOOPS development process, but wouldn't it be helpful to release a preview, beta, RC, or whatever you want to call it, to get more eyes looking for problems? You know, the old "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" thing.
It's your project and I doubt my post will change the way you see things, but I like to try new code, find and fix things and feel like I'm giving something back to the community, instead of being merely a "consumer" of OSS goods.
The slow, secretive development process was what caused me to abandon XOOPS a year ago and go find another CMS. I'm back because I like the way the code base works and I see that the new releases are much improved, but I'm still a bit confounded by the dev community. Not that you don't produce good code, but that the development process is more like proprietary software than the Bazaar approach that I'm accustomed to.
I appreciate the code and the way it is licensed, but it is little wonder that so many folks are inclined to fork code, as that is the only avenue they see to make improvements and give them back to the community.