GroupJive

Thanks for your thoughts on that, here are mine:

I never claimed it would be easy. But I am saying 5 years is a looooong time to find answers to all the questions you are asking.

This facebook like style not only for GroupJive but also everywhere throughough CB for me this is not just some feature. It is industry standard set by Facebook and that's why I think CB is below the standard which is not where it should be. That is why it is so sad that this specific feature has such a low priority for you for years. I mean Facebook is showing every single day how it is done and how great this feature works for a community..

Because of that I think your general approach, with CB Activity and stream integration is vital for CB and probably should be the base all other plugins would connect to. If I would have to make the decision, I would not see GJ without CB Activity and without fully aggregated wall anymore. I think this old style is completey outdated.

As you mentioned your thoughts about marketing that influences your decisions, let me repeat what I have already said before: This feature is absolutely essential from my point of view. I was a happy pro member a long time ago until I realised that this feature is not around the corner. I will only become a paid member again when this feature is out. The sooner this feature is into place the sooner there will be one more paying member (me).
So you might wanna take into account when you think about marketing that a feature like this might attract customers to renew or upgrade their membership with you.

And here is a last thought because surely at the end of the day everything is about money: Have you ever thought to crowdfund new features? I have absolutely no idea if this could work. But I would be absolutely willing to pay let's say $50 to see this feature. I know this is not a crowd yet, but maybe there are like 50 other who would be willing to pay for that too or even hundred. This might cover basic development costs for new features and let you keep your pricing structure. Maybe it would be even enough to hire some freelancers for assisting you as indeed your work load must be extreme and it is insane to have only one person being responsible for almost everything.

This facebook like style not only for GroupJive but also everywhere throughough CB for me this is not just some feature. It is industry standard set by Facebook and that's why I think CB is below the standard which is not where it should be. That is why it is so sad that this specific feature has such a low priority for you for years. I mean Facebook is showing every single day how it is done and how great this feature works for a community..

You can not possibly compare Facebook to CB and claim that's fair in any way. Facebook has their entirely own proprietary architecture for things like streams. They've easily a team of 100+ maintaining Facebook. They've millions in funding and have had far more years than CB to mature. Does anyone remember when Facebook just came out? It didn't have 1/10th of what it has now. Software is constantly evolving over time and improving. We personally are always saying that there's always room for improvement and that will always be true for all our products.

Now I know many would probably just say "well.. hire more people!". That again is easier said than done. First can we have more of your money? Because that's what it'd take. Is everyone OK with prices increasing by at least 50% to pay another wage? I doubt it. Second can we find someone who has the coding experience or support experience we need? I certainly don't have the time to train someone and get them up to speed. So they need Joomla and CB experience. They need PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS, JS, etc.. experience (even for support as we provide coding examples and usecase examples here). They need to be completely fluent with English (we only operate here with English and I need to be able to communicate with them). Even if we did find someone it's full circle back to: "Will you pay more for our products?".

Because of that I think your general approach, with CB Activity and stream integration is vital for CB and probably should be the base all other plugins would connect to. If I would have to make the decision, I would not see GJ without CB Activity and without fully aggregated wall anymore. I think this old style is completey outdated.

Not everyone sees or uses CB the way you do. We've plenty who have no need for CB Activity (or GJ for that matter) and happily never install it. That's the great power of CB in that it's modular. You use what you need and simply don't install what you don't need. CB Activity WILL integrate with GJ and and it already integrates with other plugins via System Actions in CB Auto Actions and those plugins are slowly getting their needed code to customize their activity output. All of these wheels are already in motion. Your decision would be an end to a product until it has CB Activity integration and that's just ludicrous, sorry. There will be migration to the 2 new integration plugins so using GJ now in its current state is perfectly viable and will easily migrate to the new integrations when available.

As you mentioned your thoughts about marketing that influences your decisions, let me repeat what I have already said before: This feature is absolutely essential from my point of view. I was a happy pro member a long time ago until I realised that this feature is not around the corner. I will only become a paid member again when this feature is out. The sooner this feature is into place the sooner there will be one more paying member (me).
So you might wanna take into account when you think about marketing that a feature like this might attract customers to renew or upgrade their membership with you.

I understand it's important to you. It's important to me too. I understand it can potentially bring more customers. CB Gallery already brought new customers. Language Overrides, although a free addition to CB, also brought customers. The bottom line is progress = customers; and I am progressing as quickly as I can. We've had more people ask for language overrides than GJ 3.1.0 by a long shot. What I'm getting at is everyone has an opinion on what should be next and there's always someone waiting on something to be implemented.

And here is a last thought because surely at the end of the day everything is about money: Have you ever thought to crowdfund new features? I have absolutely no idea if this could work. But I would be absolutely willing to pay let's say $50 to see this feature. I know this is not a crowd yet, but maybe there are like 50 other who would be willing to pay for that too or even hundred. This might cover basic development costs for new features and let you keep your pricing structure. Maybe it would be even enough to hire some freelancers for assisting you as indeed your work load must be extreme and it is insane to have only one person being responsible for almost everything.

Yes, we tried it with CBSubs payment processors and it failed miserably. No one wants to pay extra on top of their subscription. Hardly anyone donates either. On top of that I'm just 1 guy and I'm not fond of dollars dictating what project is prioritized. You can throw all kinds of money at me and it won't change the fact that there's only so many hours in a day and I don't have any intentions working some crazy 80 hour weeks (I am already pushing 50+ for the past 6 years...).

There's no way I'd let freelancer code come anywhere near my projects, sorry. The bottom line is so many developers do not meet my standards or expectations. Code needs to be clean, formatted how we format it, commented where necessary, functions and variables should be descriptive, several caching methods should be explored, NO core hacks are permitted (everything must be extended appropriately), and our security standards are extremely high. Someone giving me a chunk of code that's made of spaghetti gives me more work than just not contributing at all. Maybe that's just me being picky, but if I have to completely redo a contribution I might as well just implement it my self.

CB and our plugins are already open source and have been for years yet we've seen no attempts at clean contributions regardless. We are always open to contributions and as long as they meet our standards we've no issues with reviewing officially merging them in. It may sound strict, but it's the same qualifications you're going to run into for any well maintained open source project. We do not have a public GIT repository at this time, but it's something we're looking into as a possibility in the future.


Back to the topic on hand though. CB Gallery rewrite is done. I'm working on CB 2.1. Once it's done I'll finish GJ 3.0.2. Then begin work on the CB Activity API rewrites. Once that's done it's onto GJ 3.1.0. I have no idea how long this will take. Depends on what issues I run into, etc.. Could be all done before end of this year or it may take a little longer. I've no idea, but it'll get done regardless. All of my plans got shoved a good 7 months due to the new site and demo site (we attempted to contract that out and it just wasn't working out) so I apologize for all the delays, but things happen.

I hope that helps clarify things a little and for you to understand that I do care about your needs and I am working towards them.

Thanks for your answer. I am not comparing CB to Facebook. What I am saying is that Facebook has set a standard billions of users are used to and by incorporating these standards, CB owners could participate on Facebooks success.
Some of your competitors have realised that all of them came out after CB to my knowledge and have overtaken in the meantime: dashbite.com/products/jomwall , easysocial.stackideas.com/ and of course the famouse www.jomsocial.com/demo who even created a Wordpress version in the meantime.
For me this looks like there is demand and CB misses that out in a way.

Surely one person can only handle a limited amount of work. And of course it is cour decision if you want or can hire people to aid. But the "my code is better than your code" attitude I have seen that often and I believe it is more an attitude than a real issue. You mentioned Facebook yourself with hundreds of programmers who for some reason can work together and output code that basically works.
But it is not my intention to lecture. It is totally up to you how you run your company / projects. But if it was my project and my lead programmer was telling me that he needs to delay projects because there is too much work or that he even cannot train somebody because he does not have the time, that would certainly raise a red flag, that it is time to for some changes.
But again, no lecturing, just my thoughts on what you said about your situation and the amount of work you have to handle.

I hope you gonna check out the links to your competitors that I have posted who are on the same Joomla architecture like CB. Maybe then you better see what can be done and then you hopefully understand why the situation at CB is not satisfying for me.

And some off-topic hint: When using Quick Reply here on the board and switching to full editor, the posting already written gets lost. It would be great if it would be transferred into the advanced editor automatically.

But the "my code is better than your code" attitude I have seen that often and I believe it is more an attitude than a real issue.

We absolutely don't have that attitude. We simply have standards that need to be followed. Joomla has coding standards that must be followed before they'll merge anything. Any serious project does. If someone can't follow those standards then their contribution won't be accepted. At the very least when contributing to CB following Joomla standards will go a long way. You can't possible expect us to accept spaghetti code.

You mentioned Facebook yourself with hundreds of programmers who for some reason can work together and output code that basically works.

They all follow a coding standard for their code base and use version control.

But it is not my intention to lecture. It is totally up to you how you run your company / projects. But if it was my project and my lead programmer was telling me that he needs to delay projects because there is too much work or that he even cannot train somebody because he does not have the time, that would certainly raise a red flag, that it is time to for some changes.
But again, no lecturing, just my thoughts on what you said about your situation and the amount of work you have to handle.

The only major delay was the 4-6 months of working on our new website and demo site. Aside from that everything is still on track. As I've already explained 2 plugins need major API overhaul before I can even begin GJ 3.1.0 as it'll be utilizing that API which isn't even implemented yet. 1 of those plugins is done. Now we're doing a CB release followed by GJ 3.0.1 since it has been sitting in a build state for awhile followed by CB Activity API overhaul and finally GJ 3.1.0. I'm not sure how else to explain it in a way that's any more clear than that. CB Gallery took way longer than I expected, but it came out fantastic because of that extra work.

And some off-topic hint: When using Quick Reply here on the board and switching to full editor, the posting already written gets lost. It would be great if it would be transferred into the advanced editor automatically.

That's an issue in Kunena. I'm already in contact with them regarding it, but we're not on Kunena 5.0.1 yet so it could be fixed already. We'll likely be upgrading sometime this week.


I feel like this discuss is just constantly going full circle and am finding my self repeating my self. I think you maybe better off just not using CB if it doesn't fit your needs and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. We encourage everyone to use what best fits their needs.

krileon wrote: We absolutely don't have that attitude. We simply have standards that need to be followed. Joomla has coding standards that must be followed before they'll merge anything. Any serious project does. If someone can't follow those standards then their contribution won't be accepted. At the very least when contributing to CB following Joomla standards will go a long way. You can't possible expect us to accept spaghetti code.

Noone has suggested that you accept spaghetti code. I certainly didn't. My suggestion was to get help if there is too much work. Of course you would have to find the right people who would be able to follow your standards and you would have to provide proper tools like version control and else what would be required.

krileon wrote: I think you maybe better off just not using CB if it doesn't fit your needs and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. We encourage everyone to use what best fits their needs.

I have quoted CBs competitors in a post above so I am certainly aware of my options. But it is no real fun to switch providers after having invested in CB, built websites on CB and developed and adjusted code for it to do what I want it to do. So that would be a last ressort and will certainly depend on CBs progress in the (very) near future.

Noone has suggested that you accept spaghetti code. I certainly didn't. My suggestion was to get help if there is too much work. Of course you would have to find the right people who would be able to follow your standards and you would have to provide proper tools like version control and else what would be required.

We will likely be making CBs git accessible next year or some form of it to make contributions easier. Unlikely we'll do so for plugins since they're commercial. I don't have the details regarding this yet as it's a ways off, but yes allowing access to our git would make things easier for people to contribute.

I have quoted CBs competitors in a post above so I am certainly aware of my options. But it is no real fun to switch providers after having invested in CB, built websites on CB and developed and adjusted code for it to do what I want it to do. So that would be a last ressort and will certainly depend on CBs progress in the (very) near future.

There are some things our competitors probably do better and there are some things we do better. They don't have CB Auto Actions or even half of the plugins we provide. CB is also entirely modular so if you don't need an activity stream you simply don't install the plugin. This keeps CB as lightweight as possible for everyone's needs. CB is also free and open source, which in it self is a huge deal for many of our users. Neither product is going to provide 100% of what you want most likely and you'll be waiting for something regardless. If a competitor fits your needs today it may not tomorrow. You may find your self waiting just as long if not longer for XYZ feature.

I just don't know what more to tell you. I've outlined my development schedule and what you're wanting will be implemented and you've a direct development path to follow to see when that happens: CB Gallery 2.0.0 (done) > CB 2.1 (working on now) > GJ 3.0.1 (nearly done) > CB Activity 4.0.0 > GJ 3.1.0. I am hoping to have all of this done this year, but I can not provide any dates as it just depends on how long each task takes.