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Need salient page on Chili Project site highlighting achievements

Added by Stéphane Gourichon at 2012-11-09 04:26 am

Hi,

The need

Many potential users need a reason for starting on Chili Project or Redmine, or switching to Chili Project (from Redmine, letting others aside in this topic).

IMHO, when forking you need to consistently show to the community of users highlights about achievements, compelling reasons for users (and developers) to join.
Until you do, from the outside it seems that the project is somehow not mature enough.

Available sources

Chili Project page

When the fork happened, there was a statement

the maintenance and evolution of Redmine has not been as predictable and responsive as its developer community is capable of. Integration of community-created patches were too sporadic, lacked a clear methodology, and was interfering with the effectiveness of the Redmine project for its users.

Ok, so should we expect a faster pace, interesting features, etc ?

It's been a year and a half. Is it time for some public communication about progress in areas where Redmine is a little weak, like e-mail interaction, flexible notifications, flexible reminders, even scheduling ?

Redmine forums

Eric wrote

Even as a committer to Redmine I ran into roadblocks trying to get code into Redmine. I met resistance even for features that a large part of the Redmine community was wanting.

What were those features ? Were they minor or major ? Are they now in Chili ?

Chili Project roadmap

Roadmap mentions release, but their summary does not cite any feature, just "bugfix" and "upgrade rails", or "security".
Some release don't even have a summary at all. Were there nothing to say ?

Isn't a summary is supposed to highlight major achievements ? Rather than letting the reader review the fine-grained list of changes where minor and major things are mixed.

Still looking there shows some interesting additions, mostly in 3.0.0.

I see taht Chili fixes some Redmine annoyances :
  • Feature #792: Confirmation emails when an incoming email is submitted (where Redmine behavior of just silently discarding e-mail from unknown addresses is a real WTF).
  • Feature #355: Turn on/off the if the start date will autofill by default

Before asking

Those pages are on the topic but do not answer:

why should people switch from Redmine to Chili? too old

Why choose Chiliproject ? actually about Drupal
Usefull user-features guide only says porting redmine docs is underway.
On long time no release?! people consider switching back to redmine, only advantage of Chili cited is aspects of UI which can be changed by styling, (and in which regards I think Redmine is better anyway).

Conclusion

Redmine and Chili still look like two projects advancing at similar, with lost value in features existing only on one side.

From http://www.ohloh.net/p/compare?project_0=Redmine&project_1=Chiliproject (ref mentioning) it even seems that there are indeed more developers but less commits. Are they bigger commits,

LoC graph from Ohloh is a little surprising (red is Redmine, green is Chili)

Thank you for any communication on this topic.


Replies (4)

RE: Need salient page on Chili Project site highlighting achievements - Added by Chris Dähn at 2012-12-17 10:47 am

Hi,

a great summary of questions I also have.

I'm just a user, not a developer... but as far as I heard it here in the discussions the devs had some trouble this year and thus some releases and public visible activities were delayed for months...

A next issue is, that (in contrary to Redmine) the devs are overhauling the whole ChiliProject kernel to make it future-proof (Ruby 3.0), more flexible and with cleaner interfaces (fur plugin devs, for example)...

And honestly: I think they really need help for the public relations and documentation stuff... So that's a point where even we as users may help them...

Are you currently using Chili or are you evaluating/searching for a solution?
Maybe I can answer a few of your questions.

ciao,
Chris

RE: Need salient page on Chili Project site highlighting achievements - Added by Felix Schäfer at 2012-12-26 04:39 pm

Stéphane, you have a lot of good points, but to put it bluntly: We are to few people to do everything, and currently I'm trying to limit my time on the forum to have more time for code. I agree with you that better/nicer docs and so on would be great, they are moot if we have nothing to show for it.

Regarding the specific point of releases: we announce each release on the ChiliProject blog

If you have ideas how to improve the landing page, docs and so on, feel free to share your thoughts or even better your mockups or code. If you want to get invested to maintain those, all the better.

RE: Need salient page on Chili Project site highlighting achievements - Added by Stéphane Gourichon at 2013-02-16 07:18 pm

Hi Felix,

Thank you for caring to answer.

I now see that some releases have a link to the corresponding blog post. Good ! Having this every time (have a check-list of things to do at each release) sends to the world a positive signal about Chili Project.

Now, congratulations for posts like http://blog.chiliproject.org/code/going-forward-focus/ . The change you describe will allow you to tell in release notes "Major work on user-visible feature X" and the like.

For each project we develop, there are 1000 where we are pure users. And users care about user-visible changes.

Also, remember that software that has too many partly overlapping install/upgrade guides (and nothing that looks like a clean simple install) means hidden costs, and users don't want hidden costs. Redmine lacks in this respect. When you want to grow your user base, make some effort at install/upgrade, advertise it and you'll see many users abandon Redmine for Chili Project.

For that matter, I wouldn't blindly follow everything in http://www.12factor.net/ but some of it is definitely good practice.

Regards,

RE: Need salient page on Chili Project site highlighting achievements - Added by Chris Dähn at 2013-02-25 02:56 pm

Hi Stephane,

I started polishing the install docs and came to the same point:
These docs and the install procedure as should be reduced to a short and simple to follow instruction set - see ticket #1221.

Currently I'm working at a new landing page for this project, where the contents especially for CP users are rewritten to be short and fancy.

Hope I can show something the next weeks...

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