Hi Alexie,

I do appreciate your offer of help, its just that I am not in a good position to receive the offered help.

At this time I have very little ability to coordinate the efforts of others or integrate their changes into mojoPortal. Some day when I am making a decent living at this I will have more time for that. mojoPortal is open source but open source does not mean that anyone who wants to can contribute to development. All changes to mojoPortal code have to be approved by me and I am very busy and I find that when others try to help it often goes much slower than if I just do the work myself. I also cannot afford to have my time derailed away from my own priorities and focused on the priorities that others choose.

A better internal comment system is on my road map, you will have to wait for it. I do not plan to improve the blog comment system, I plan to make a new comment sub system that can be re-used in multiple features and then I will replace the current blog comment system with the new one.

The only alternative if you want to customize a feature or you don't want to wait for me to make improvements is to clone it first. 

Best,

Joe

Hi,

The problem is not so much with new features unless they are in the core of mojoPortal, if someone wants to develop a new content feature that plugs into mojoPortal they can do so freely and if they produce something useful and want to contribute it and use our svn repository to maintain it I am open to that and it has been done in the past, sincere people should contact me and propose what they want to do. In creating new features it does not have to distract me from my own agenda. The Poll and Survey features were both contributed by community members.

But for the core of mojoPortal or existing features it is different. Nothing stops you from exporting the code from svn and then creating your own fork on GitHub or elsewhere, but to contribute changes to my version you must first earn my trust and realize how your changes fit into my plans or not. Best way to prove yourself to me is to actually implement a feature and contribute it and maintain it and prove you are committed to it, or show your expertise in the developer forums by helping people with questions that show you really know the architecture and code of mojoPortal. People who really have something to contribute tend to step up and do it, but for every one of those, many offer help but really need me to be their mentor and I simply cannot. Not saying that is the case in this instance, in this instance it is more about I already have my own plan for these improvements.

I hope to find a few people to earn my trust and be active in the development of mojoPortal and then I could delegate some further trust to them to help coordinate the efforts of others. 

But also I will say, throwing more developers at a project does not always speed up development, more formal processes are needed the more people are involved. A few or even one really good developer can out perform a larger team. There are also studies that show the more people have commit access to a project the lower the code quality. I can tell you I watched the Rainbow Portal project self implode because too many people had commit access and were admins.

In this particular case, I have a plan for a comment sub system that can be re-used, it will be faster for me to implement my own plan than to get others involved.

If you are interested in contributing or implementing a new feature, that would be great!

Best,

Joe