In the last post, I talked a little about transition. SimplePie is growing, and is the most popular it has ever been! This means two things:
- We’ve got to keep building the best RSS/Atom software available for PHP (and AJAX, and Mobile, and WordPress), and…
- We’ve got a LOT of users to support, with a LOT of questions to answer.
Personally, I’m currently in the process of wrapping up some work with the Yahoo! Messenger web team, and then ramping up fast on my company’s WarpShare project to try to have a technology preview ready in time for South by Southwest: Interactive. I’ve been swamped for the last two weeks, then I open up my feed reader this morning, and there are over 70 new SimplePie support requests. Quite frankly, I can’t keep up.
I’ve already reached a point where I’m barely able to do any development on SimplePie because of all of the support and maintenance I’ve been doing, and I really want to get back to developing more. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours writing tutorials, FAQs, documentation, and example code. We moved all of our docs over to a wiki so that the community could more effectively contribute. I know that some of you help answer questions for others, and that’s appreciated more than you know. But as a whole, I don’t know if anyone but the development team is subscribed to the RSS feeds for the forum, and can help answer questions more effectively. And I can’t keep taking on this kind of load primarily by myself.
So… in an effort to more effectively push support into the hands of those who are capable of helping, I’m going to begin the process of shutting down new registrations and posts on the existing support forum (thereby turning it into an archive), and opening up a new Yahoo! Groups mailing list/forum. Yahoo! Groups is pretty good, they’ve got a web-based forum-like view, but most importantly they’ve got mailing list support.
In my experience, those who are subscribed to a mailing list are able to get more information, and are more capable of contributing to the discussions. And that’s what we want: more people contributing to the discussions.
Again my schedule is a bit jumbled right now, so this will probably happen sometime over the next few weeks, but it’s coming. By spreading the SimplePie support load more effectively, we’ll have one more developer who can devote more time to improving SimplePie… and really, I think that’s what we all want. 🙂