Please note that the forum isn't realy used anymore.

If you have questions, want support or just simply want to talk to us you can find us on slack.

 

Is Fork CMS becoming unsupported?

I have not seen an update in months. Websites is not updated, modules are out dated. What is happening? Will it become unsupported?

Not that I know of :) Fork cms just does not have many core members, and they all have their daily jobs. Would be great if more developers would get involved on github on a core level, not just making modules or themes. Maybe as fork cms moves (slowly) on to a full-stack symfony framework, more Symfony developers will try out fork. As for outdated modules, that's the issue with developers creating a module and open-sourcing it but never look back to it. When I need a module or theme that's outdated, I often upgrade it and make a pull request though.

The website could use some updates and a style refresh/upgrade though. The website was designed by Yoni De Beule and logo by Stephan Verhalleman (I think, from what I found on the internet). Both of them moved from Belgium to San Francisco to work at Yelp. Dieter was fork community manager for a while and maintained the website but has switched jobs a while ago. So there's not that much people actively maintaining the website atm.

Fork CMS is used daily by several web agencies in Belgium (Wijs, Figure8, Sumocoders), and the Netherlands (and other countries probably?) so it's not becoming unsupported. Just a bit slow for new features/updates...

Ive made lots of PR to developers of modules. But no one managed to take a look. I have lots of modules refactored, I will try to put them on my GitHub ASAP, but I cant put any that is not mine. I`m working on Fork CMS over 2 years now, but support is just becoming slower and slower by every day. I wish support would come back to life, then I would spend more time supporting this CMS myself.

I agree with Ishiki. I also think that Fork CMS would be better supported with something like a marketplace. To see if all you modules are up to date. I think it would be great of all the modules might be updated by other users, probably via GitHub. Just like this forum, there are a lot of bugs which could be fixed by other users and would improve Fork CMS.

All though if you look at the code in GitHub you can see that there where some code changes 7 days ago. But i don't know what about the pull requests if they are accepted.

At the end, I like Fork CMS. Fork CMS is what my customers need and easy to use.

I would love to see marketplace where developers could share their modules or themes. That would attract developers and supporters at the same time. I would be glad to participate in such project. :)

That's absolutely correct and I had this idea of a marketplace too. Plenty of CMS websites that implement a marketplace of modules and themes with sidebar with filters etc. I also want to make the forum better and more advanced (and I already started adding pagination to this forum, a honeypot field to prevent spam, updated the markdown engine so we can use images/strikethrough/github syntax etc, prevented some XSS on the forum, etc...). The forum could use things like adding a searchbox and more UI stuff and badges, code highlighting, flag posts, notification badges, ...

But the current website of fork cms is not running on the latest Fork CMS, it's running ~3.6, so the modules have a few differences with the modules you would build for Fork CMS 3.9 and I'd rather not make new "oldstyle" modules like a marketplace for an older version of fork. The default triton theme (and the fork-cms.com theme) should also get an update to stay fresh and be responsive. I would love it if the people from Wijs would update this Triton theme and/or make a new fork-cms.com design using their own awesome Chopstick BEM Sass framework ;-) But I don't pay their salary to work on this for a few days ;-)

Ideally, there should be a Fork CMS hackaton powered by the agencies that use Fork everyday + fork enthusiasts like me, where the subject is to brainstorm, work on integrating doctrine and some other features that have been on the roadmap for way too long. And (start) developing a new website for Fork CMS and create additional modules like the marketplace. Because when those features are added and Fork is supporting all Symfony components, then it's probably the best time to create a new website that can be online for another x years and get updated frequently.

In februari there already has been such a "Forkathon", where a few agencies work together to add a feature and do a bugsquash and solve/merge/close many pull requests and issues. In the last half year, Fork CMS has started to organize 2-monthly Meetups with presentations again, which is great. And they wanted to do more frequent releases (monthly). But the few core developers have their daily jobs and most of the time they don't have spare time left to work on fork cms. Or other developers are getting poked and don't comment back on open pull requests they made so these pull requests stay open for a long time.

The next update is probably Fork CMS 3.10 and it's been on a github branch for a while, featuring a responsive backend in bootstrap and twig support coming to forkcms so that's awesome! But it still needs a lot of testing and finetuning I think before releasing. So I'll guess I'm going to take a look at that branch and help out when I find some time.

edit: correct me if I'm wrong somewhere in my text, I'm no core member ;-)

Yeah 3.10 version will be cool. I`m constantly merging any master changes into that my 3.10 fork. So Fork CMS devs should have less work to do. But its sad that this feature is almost half year old and it is becoming older while Bootstrap 4 came out.

I think the great problem in this picture is that he agencies have to donate time from their developers to work on Fork. Tis way it has always been and that's why development goes slow. When agencies have loads of work they haven't got time to donate to Fork. People have to do all the work after their dayjobs you know. It would be a great idea to introduce more core members.

PR's are only being merged after coremeetings where they discuss the available PR's. I think that's one meeting per month but I can be wrong. I wish we still had a community manager but as Fork doesn't have any income who will pay him ;)

As for the idea of a marketplace, those plans have been made but the ETA is unknown. It would be some kind of module in the backend from where you could install or buy the needed modules. It was presented a couple of Fork meetups ago!

Just add donate option within website. You will get some money without marketplace and that would be a great start. I liked Ubuntu donate option, where u choose your donation amount and it says what you can buy for that amount. 2 eur = cup of coffee :D Damn companies make thousands of Fork CMS and would not donate 2 euros? I think donations is where Fork CMS should start. Also they accept PR, I have already made some, but no one wants to spend time when Core members are so inactive. I can see only 1 guy updating Fork CMS, where are others?

I disagree that you should let people donate. No-one will donate money, or nowhere near the amount that would be needed to pay for meaningful development.

I also don't see the need to improve the fork-cms.com website or the forum, or build a marketplace. While those are all very worthwile projects, those development resources would be much better spent working on Fork CMS itself.

And I don't think the core devs are the ones that should be churning our those new features. The core devs are the gatekeepers: they should ensure Fork CMS stability, guide & facilitate other devs to contribute to Fork CMS (e.g. review pull requests, organise meetings, ...) I do agree that reviewing pull requests once a month is a little slow, though.

I think it's everyone's job to improve Fork CMS. It's open source & everyone can contribute. Hackathons, agencies with spare cycles, ... are all great to help move the needle, but any individual can do so. I think the recent integration of bootstrap (https://github.com/forkcms/forkcms/pull/1077) was a great example. Someone just decided to do it :)

Fork CMS has come a long way in their integration with Symfony. As I understand it, only a few more components should be integrated. How about someone just starts with a basic implementation, see how it goes, submit the pull request and take it from there? I'm sure the core devs (and others) will be happy to review & help push it through!

Modules and Themes are outdated on official website. That says everything. I would fix this myself, but I dunno how. I love Fork, but it looks like that some Core devs just dont give a fuck :D.

Core devs indeed shouldn't give a fuck about modules - that's not core ;) But you're correct that there is currently no way for outsiders to contribute to those modules. Let's tackle that with http://www.fork-cms.com/community/forum/detail/modules-themes-work

I also noticed that my previous comment almost made it look like I blame individual enthousiasts. That's not at all what I meant. Individuals, core devs & agencies alike should all contribute to Fork CMS within their potential. I just wanted to point out that, IMO, we don't need to come up with fancy solutions. We just need someone to take action.

I'm glad you volunteer to fix modules (once you can...) - that's the kind of mentality Fork CMS (and any open source project) needs. Anyone can make a big difference.

It is clear, that Fork developers should be a little bit more active.

I think we should be grateful that great developers are giving up their spare time to contribute.

A lot of work has been done but you cannot "see" the difference for now

If you wish to help us out on fixing stuff, just read the topic that Mathias started on the forum ( link somewhere up in this thread ) . I made a list of all modules and themes that need fixing, then you can always make PR's ;)

I think I will start with GitHub issues :)

I agree with John on the problem of updating the modules. When I look at my situation, the problem is indeed that I need (spare) time to update the module, which I don't have because of lots of client work within my agency. I try to update when possible but with the changes in Fork CMS (Symfony) it is kinda hard to catch up all the time, I think this is also a reason why modules get outdated. When Fork CMS is fully integrated with Symfony there will be more focus on updating the modules I guess.

I do not think Fork CMS is becoming unsupported, in fact, it will be better supported in the future because of the Symfony integration. However this may take some time to develop.

A invitation to a "Forkathon" for all contributing agencies would be a great way to sit with eachother and do major updates on e.g. modules ;) (maybe this could be something for in the weekends).

When fork will be fully Sympony supported? a plan? even no guaranteed one is cool enough.

It's just not possible to provide you an ETA. I'm really sorry...

Comment

The forum is deprecated in favor of our Slack channel, which provides real-time support for your issues.

Join us on Slack here: https://fork-cms.herokuapp.com/