Yesterday Tim Geyssens posted a blog about his concerns regarding the direction Umbraco CMS is or is not going.
So I would like to share my thoughts on his observations.
Exhibit A - Commercial product(s) without support
I can totally agree with this one. Forms needs attention. We heard this being worked on. But in my opinion this is long overdue.
Especially when you raise a ticket as a Gold Partner. One of the selling points of the Gold Partnership is that support will have your back. But from experience I know that you will get the answer that only severity one bugs (security, site instability) will be picked up.
Exhibit B - No affordable way to learn and keep your Umbraco knowledge up to date.
Again I agree. When I started out using Umbraco taking all the training courses (level 1 and level 2) would cost you about €2000. That's a big increase over a decade of time. I wish my salary made the same increase.
Umbraco.tv would have been a nice low-budget entry point in to training, but it needs some new content.
Exhibit C - "New" product that gets a sloppy release
I won't go into it if the release was sloppy or not. But I was surprised the release happened at all.
I don't think this is a product the community was waiting for. But I stand corrected if it happens to be.
To me it feels Umbraco wants get into a market that is already taken IMHO (Wix, Squarespace, ...) and competes directly with what the community is doing : building sites on top of Umbraco.
I haven't tested it, but seeing the screenshots with a plethora of options, goes directly against a unique selling point of Umbraco : a tailored editing experience. People new to Umbraco trying this out can get the wrong image of what Umbraco can do for them.
I think HQ needs to decide what they want Umbraco to be. A flexible CMS that can be tailored to your projects needs and be capable of doing "small" websites aswell as big enterprise projects.... Or a sitebuilder.
You can't have your cake and eat it.
The effort and resources used to build this should have been used to fix Forms and some of the recurring issues of Umbraco Cloud.
Exhibit D - False stats on the umbraco.com homepage
Personally I don't care about stats. 75% of all statistics are made up ;-)
This is just a marketing number.
But I can say the community is bigger and more active than ever. And I am also a long time user of Umbraco (since 2008). But people are engaging in other ways than in the past, where it was mainly forum posts and releasing packages.
People are now contributing more in other ways... There has never been more contributions to core by the community than now. I can speak from experience having been part of the PR team for 2 year. Also people are writing documentation...which did not even exist back in the day. People are organising virtual meet ups, doing podcasts, ....
Not every contribution has to be code related.
But what I do notice is that some of the "old timers" have moved on to something else.. But I think that is natural. Once I was active member of the DNN community, but I don't think anybody will remember that.
I also used to be very active member on the forum, but my interest moved more to code contributions so I am not that active anymore over there. This makes me less visible, but I am still active.
Exhibit...
- Content apps are useful in my opinion. But mostly on a project basis. That is why you don't see many packages that have one.
- AngularJs still does the job, but to stay relevant a better and newer tech should be used. But before this can happen a lot of refactoring needs to be done. There is a work in progress to remove as much of the angular code as possible. A good place to start helping out.
My Observations
It is no secret I (and probably many others) was very disappointed in the way how V8 was released.
First of all the timing. At some point 3 test tracks were announced before V8 would be released : editor, implementor and contributor. Each of these groups could provide feedback. But from the editor track they went straight to release, skipping 2 important tracks. This put a lot of stress on package developers. They got a lot of questions like "When will package x be compatible with V8". But because of lacking documentation and a lot of breaking changes porting a package was not a easy tasks. I still haven't ported all of mine.
Then there was communication...
Blog posts saying that is ready for production and that you should migrate. But it was not stable, lacking documentation and no way to migrate.
This took a way my energy to the extend I stopped contributing and sharing. But luckily there were some community members I could talk to who helped me overcome this.
Now what ?
I think HQ is having growing pains as a commercial entity, while it needs to keep in touch with the community needs. And can be the cause of frustration on both ends.
But people need to speak up otherwise HQ is not aware of this. So I am glad Tim wrote this blog post. Although I don't agree with all the things he said, it inspired me to do the same.
So if HQ is open for a constructive and open discussion... So am I.
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