Welcoming our GitHub Moderator: Jeroen Desloovere

Next to our forum moderator we would like to introduce Jeroen who will follow up the GitHub issues and pull-requests. In this way we would like to improve the response time on incoming bug reports. He already started with tagging the current open issues and introducing a new tag: Discussion required. Whenever this tag is assigned the issue will get discussed during the next technical meeting.

Jeroen works as PHP Web Developer at a Belgian communication agency Siesqo, they chose Fork CMS as their preferred CMS and regularly contribute back. But also after work hours Jeroen is an active community member. Hardly a day goes by without him having an open pull-request ready.

Follow Jeroen on Twitter or GitHub via siesqo and deslooverej.

Welcoming our first moderator: John Poelman

Last week we introduced our integrated forum which made it possible to gain support, manage extensions or contribute with only a GitHub account. A new group of moderators will help us to maintain the forum and improve support to new Fork CMS members. As first member of the group, meet John Poelman!

John is a well-known Fork CMS community member and with more than 350 replies one of the most active members of the old forum. Two years ago he made his first pull-request and didn't stop since.

His side project Instathals shows already 386 instagram photos of his hometown Herentals. On his blog - based on Fork CMS off-course - you'll find a variety of technological articles, visit at bloobz.be. Follow him on Twitter and GitHub.

New integrated forum

A few new users warned us that their forum topics didn't show up on the forum like they were supposed to. Besides, new users needed to register for another account just to ask a question. That's why we integrated a new forum into our support section. You can now report bugs, contribute code / documentation / translations, discuss, ask questions, comment or manage your extensions with only a GitHub account.

The next step is moving all discussions from the old forum to the new one, until the move is complete the old forum will still be accessible. The forum module will also be open-sourced later on.

Fork CMS support screenshot

We hope you'll find all the answers you need on our renewed support section. If not, ask around on the new forum!

Profiles on fork-cms.com

  • Written by Dieter Wyns on Thursday 31 October 2013
  • 3 comments

By far the most important factor of an open-source product is the community. The people behind a project bring innovation, durability, maintenance and great features. Therefore it's important that their vision and ideas are reflected onto a public dashboard.

Fork-cms.com profile example

With Profiles we take a first step on showing the faces behind Fork CMS. For now, your own profile allows you to share your Extensions and Showcase items into a centralised list. The functionality will expand over time, with a truly transparent platform as end goal. To maintain control and guarantee the same level of quality we review each entry.

Along with the profiles comes the ability to subscribe to our new newsletter. Again, we want to focus on quality. The subscribers will receive an email when a major version is released or other significant updates.

Stay tuned!

New Theme: Opengray

  • Written by Dieter Wyns on Wednesday 19 June 2013
  • 2 comments

We would describe the theme as clean and corporate, but take a look for yourself at our demo website.

The Fork CMS theme OpenGray

Features

The theme includes customized content templates which allow you to quickly make call-to-actions in the layout of the theme. Although the live search functionality is standard in Fork CMS it's nice to see a clean implementation in this theme. The user is redirected to this page if he couldn't find what he was looking for via the autosuggest.

Building a community or want a login for your clients? If you add the login box widget to the main navigation it provides a dropdown menu to quickly access the profile actions.

Other features:

  • microdata
  • meta navigation support
  • multilingual support
  • etc.

Download the theme on the extension page. Missing something or want to make your own version? Fork the theme on GitHub.

The numbers

We come a long way since the first version of Fork CMS was made open for the public. In october we celebrate our third open-source anniversary. And the very first documents for the closed version found in the archive are made in march 2007. With the switch to Symfony it is a good time take a look back and see how we're doing.

Since the launch of the website on september 1st 2011 we had more than 60.000 downloads. That's about 100 downloads each day. If we take the numbers over time, we see a large interest at the launch of the new website because of the mention on Mashable.

Timeline of downloads in Google Analytics

GitHub is where all the magic happens these days, all code contributions go through the platform, which gives us interesting data to look at. We register 35 contributors who helped us to build our codebase. Around 650 people are following us on GitHub and 150 created a subversion (or a fork) of the cms.

Timeline of commits on GitHub

What's next? The core developers team is working hard to get the switch to Symfony to go as fast as possible. Along this way, we hope to welcome the Symfony community. In the next weeks and months we will try to improve growth in contributions and try to let our current users grow with us to Symfony.

Introducing Fork CMS Partners

A great website is built to meet your marketing goals and helps you strengthen your brand and customer base. Our easy-to-use interface helps you accomplish that. Without any technical knowledge you can update the website's content to fit your needs. 

Setting up a website requires a more technical approach, therefore we encourage you to contact one of our partners to assist you. They have the expertise to guide you through the process of building the most profitable website.

To help you find the right partner we listed them on the support page of our website. We started with 21 partners that can help you setup a good Fork CMS website. The list is ordered randomly and contains the necessary information to find and contact the most suitable partner. We're in the work of extending both the amount of partners as the information provided. All suggestions are welcome!

Companies who'd like to be added as a partners can contact us at any time. 

Visit the partners page.

Feature Request: Forum module

John Poelman and Jeroen Desloovere, two main contributors of Fork CMS, want to start with the development of a forum module. The extension would work together with the profiles module, this will make it more easy to create a community around your website.