First of all, on behalf of Mike Hostetler and myself, I wanted to thank everyone for contacting either of us directly and/or who have posted on the forums with your concerns as well as suggested plans of action for the Zcodo and Qcodo community overall.
Also, I wanted to especially thank Mike Hostetler for picking up the slack while I've been MIA over the past months, with his desire to continue to push things forward, for his Zcodo initiative and with the work he's been doing overall.
We've had some very productive conversations over the past few days, and I think we've both come to the conclusion that bringing everything together sooner than later would be the best benefit to both the framework and the community overall.
To make a long story short, we've decided on a plan of action that we think can bring the most benefit to the community in both the short and the long run.
Short Term
The short term goal is to limit the split level of effort to grow and maintain the respective communities of both Qcodo and Zcodo. Mike Hostetler will be leading this effort to do the following:
** Bring existing Zcodo forums content into the existing Qcodo forums.
** Move the current Zcodo Wiki/Documentation and Zcodo issues tracker to wiki.qcodo.com and issues.qcodo.com, respectively. They will become the official wiki and issues tracker for Qcodo and Zcodo.
** Work on developing single sign-on for all drupal-based community components more-seamless integration with the existing Qcodo.com user/authentication database.
** Continue to run and maintain the Zcodo codebase as a more-active/agile flavor of the Qcodo Framework on its own SVN branch.
And in the short term, Qcodo will continue to run and be maintained in its existing CVS codebase.
Longer Term (over the next 3 to 4 months)
The long term goal is to bring tighter integration of the community overall for the framework as a whole. Also, our focus will be to provide the infrastructure for the community and the framework in order to limit the “bottleneck” that any one developer or maintainer can be to the community overall.
I will be leading this effort with a significant amount of help and assistance from Mike Hostetler:
** Migrate Qcodo to a GIT repository with a file/folder hierarchy that will allow for ease of GIT-style branching and submodules
** Assist Mike to make Zcodo a GIT-branch of the core/central Qcodo GIT respository
** Rearchitect Qcodo.com to have better community features in its forums
** Migrate the issues tracker back into the core Qcodo.com DB
** Migrate the wiki back into the core Qcodo.com DB
** Improve Qcodo.com documentation features (API and Wiki) to better-inteface with the forums, in order to have seamless commenting and discussions throughout Qcodo.com
** Provide better documentation and an easier process for code contributions from Qcodo community members into the core Qcodo release
The idea is to bring as much real-time visibility and transparency to the current state as well as the short-term and long-term next steps of the framework overall. With that visibility, the added infrastructure components within the GIT repository will allow anyone in the community to help make those next steps. If I become swamped, and if Mike Hostetler becomes busy with other tasks, other members of the community will still have all the tools necessary to create their own GIT-branches of the core Qcodo release, addressing the issues or feature enhancements that have been discussed in the community. And then through the Qcodo.com infrastructure they can still publish these updates in an “unofficial” capacity to the rest of the community, without needing intervention from any of us.
The hope, as I mention above, is to limit the amount of bottleneck that any one member or developer may have on the community overall.
Bigger Picture
I think one of the most interesting posts that I read was someone who said that the success of other frameworks (and thus, the fear of Qcodo/Zcodo) is that the other successful frameworks were developed by respective consulting companies that were wholly dependent on its success in order to succeed as a company.
What's most interesting about this is that there are companies (including Quasidea) which truly are completely dependent on the success of Qcodo in order to succeed as both a consulting and a products company.
I guess the biggest issue is the lack of visibility into this. And this is where Mike, with his company A Mountain Top, has stepped up in a big way.
Hopefully, as we progress down this path, the community overall will begin to see how dedicated all of the core contributors are in seeing Qcodo continue to grow as a successful, useful framework with a vibrant community supporting it.
As always, we look forward to your thoughts, comments and posts.