Proposal - redesign?

Phillipe http://www.joomla.org/ - has a lot of these features and a simple donation form - http://www.joomla.org/content/view/689/79/ It would be nice if PEAR was more visually appealing, but I would be happy if: 1. Every package had to have end-user documentation - see below - 2. Every package needs an associated wiki with end user docs and at least one real life example - either one held centrally or by the developer, this would be linked to from the package description page, all end user docs transferred to this. 3. Obviously a centralised wiki would be best - propose mediawiki - for domain - pearwiki.php.net or better wiki.php.net ? 4. Active User chat within the Wiki is promoted to deal with things such as doc typos - translations etc. - similar to - http://forum.joomla.org/index.php?board=12.0 5. Mailists I propose merging the General - Developers - QA - Webmaster mailists into one - call it PEAR Support 6. Ability for users to submit external resources to a package - I suppose this could be done in the wiki then? Anyway some things to ponder. Regards Ian Warner Director Triangle Solutions Ltd Philippe Jausions wrote:

Ian Warner wrote:

The last bit of news on the PEAR site is for November 2005. The Quality Assurance <http://pear.php.net/qa/> page is nice and informative, but again hasn't been updated since March 2004. It seems that there are no additional members to the PEAR group since the start. But when I look at Horde is shouts at you that this is an active vibrant project. I have done many open source projects - http://www.phpsupporttickets.com/ is mine (though this has a commercial release now) and the main thing is to keep your users happy, without the users then there is no project. PEAR would be just a group of developers using there own packages, but not getting the invaluable bug fixing audience that is required, need to put the funk back in. One person actually commented that is was down to money - not having enough money to do marketing. If PEAR had a donation page, then I am sure it would get some money in, the question is how to deal with that money, who gets responsibility, how it is spent etc, I would suggest it gets spent on maintaining the PEAR web site, and content.

I don't really think it's down to money, but just a question of time and motivation for a group of people to do Public Relation / Marketing. Yes, news are stale... Maybe the RSS feed on the right-hand side of the home page should be more prominent. And maybe major announcements should be brought up front, for instance when there's a major RFC process going on... And forget Google's Summer of Code which should have been on the home page too, that could have brought more developers in the community. You could even feature a "Package of the week", or have some "Call for documentation / sample"... or a "How I used PEAR in my project(s)" abstract that could link to someone's blog... So, bottom line, yes a lot could be done for PR to make PEAR look more lively... and that would be good. Maybe someone should be paid to do so if nobody has time... that'd bring back to the lack of donation link (which requires somekind of formal administrative registration somewhere most likely I believe) -Philippe