We Aren't Dead Yet: HubPress Roadmap
In a bug report we triaged recently, a new HubPress adopter questioned the future of the project.
We have not released a platform update since June 2016. It’s a fair question for the HubPress community to ask what the future of the project is, and whether they should perhaps begin looking for another AsciiDoc static site blogging platform.
Before we get to that, let’s take stock of where the project currently stands:
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We have a new plug-in architecture that modularises HubPress publishing components.
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We have a brand new GitBook Documentation Portal which supercedes the repo-hosted docs.
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We have 2,700 forks of the project.
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We have a lot of happy HubPressers (and some blog teams) pumping out posts on a platform originally conceived as a proof of concept.
This is a good place for any Open Source project to be in!
As far as work goes however, we have no shortage of bugs and enhancements:
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12 Bugs
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9 docs improvements
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50 (yes, 50) enhancement requests.
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plus a few other miscellaneous bugs, but whatever: 50 Enhancements!
What Anthonny and I need to start doing is working on the project, not in the project for it to evolve and grow. We need to do the following:
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Give the HubPress community a real chance to contribute to the project.
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Develop a Contribution Framework for developers and translators.
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Document the project architecture so developers can understand the product.
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Motivate developers to contribute to the plug-in framework that HubPress is now built upon.
This is the key to reinvigorating the project, because it will let the community create new features in a modular way.
It is far more motivating to work on small, achievable releases than looking at 90 issues and feeling overwhelmed. Using a new feature in GitHub, we’ve created our first roadmap. The idea behind each roadmap is to use them as release mileststones for us to group similar bugs and enhancements.
Milestones will not contain a lot of issues. We’ve agreed that about six issues is a good average number, with no more than 10 in total. Limiting a milestone to a low number of issues will help keep the team focused and keep the velocity up.
The hard part for us is working out what issues to prioritise first. You can help us with this. It’s time to cast your vote. We can filter on the number of reactions (thumbs-up) an issue gets, and prioritise these for action in a future milstone. We’re only filtering on thumbsup, so while smileys are nice they won’t help in this case.
If you want to talk more about this, you can join the discussion on https://hubpressio.slack.com
So that’s where we are at the moment.
Where we go next is up for discussion.
Let’s talk.