Promote developers community

idea
#1

NewsBlur os OpenSource, but it has no developers community at all.

That’s kinda sad and make it weaker. Nobody seems to understand its source and I’ve never seen somabody say they have their own setup of NewsBlur. Probably there are ppl that installed it, but those ppl arent coming back to help its evolution. And while that we see Samuel overloaded with infra issues and a lot of feature requests pending.

IDK how exactally Samuel sees NewsBlur having an active devs community. He’d not have make it OpenSource if he didn’t want one, but it’s not promoted at all. In example, there’s no source control tickets software available, like Trac or Redmine. Without that we can’t easily see what’s going on and what are future plans, we can’t openly submit diff patches, we can’t work cooperatively to provide code donations for future features.

I myself am not skilled in technologies it uses, but I could try to help. Anybody willing to help could see a ticket of a feature that will be soon implemented and do it and donate the code, or could test the software and open a ticket with a fix patch.

I suggest taking a look on Wordpress and Wordpress.com business model. Wordpress has a huge devs community, many ppl have their own setups, shared hosts offer easy installs, and still Automattic is full of money. Many free users could install it at home and free Samuel’s expensive servers, while developers help him evolve the software.

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#2

I know dozens of installations running NewsBlur. They just don’t talk about it. I don’t see the source as being so much of a community as an insurance policy against newsblur.com going down.

Also, there are tickets, it’s under Issues on GitHub. And it’s quite active. But remember that most developers aren’t able to handle the immense amount of work and testing required to write good patches for NewsBlur. It’s hard because it’s a complex vertically integrated system. And I don’t expect anybody to come in and write real shippable features. I have, however, had a number of users come in and fix small bugs.

NewsBlur is not exactly like Wordpress. There is an enormous amount of server resources needed to run NewsBlur at full speed. It’s not for the faint of heart.

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#3

NewsBlur is on github, which is a source control solution. You should have a look at that.

I don’t see this as a problem at all, NewsBlur being open-souce is an added benefit, but it is absolutely nothing like Wordpress - it can’t be thrown on any old sever and run by a novice like Wordpress can (and it won’t/shouldn’t ever be)

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