The first month of e107 v2 Bootstrap Alpha release comes to a close…

We've been taking notes, and here's the action plan on strengthening support!

The good:

For e107, it’s been a month of major changes. We’ve brought online the Alpha Release of our new flagship software, a new website, and we’re encouraging our users for the first time to have a look at the new content management system that we are developing and sending in those bug reports through our presence on GitHub.

It’s been great chatting with more of you on GitHub than ever before and we’re looking forward with your help to bring e107 v2 Bootstrap to the market sooner rather than later. We wanted to give you an update one month on, on how we intend to deal with some of the persistent issues and complaints about some of the decisions taken.

The not-so-good: The support framework – mea culpa!

About a month ago, we announced a bold move on the support front which we know hasn’t been without flaws. It’s great to see so many being very passionate about e107’s community. And whilst some accusations have been levied without any facts or substance, we also know as a team that there’s room for improvement on this front.

As a team, meetings over the last months made it clear to us the level of service we wanted to commit to without overpromising or overstretching ourselves based on the volunteer resources we have available to us [which isn’t a whole lot!].

What won’t change: e107.org is now exclusively our product site

This in turn prompted the decision for e107.org to cease becoming a community presence, and to be repositioned as a product site, showcasing what could be done with the product, providing the latest details on product development, and providing a growing documentations resource on the use of e107 for both developers and users.

Development has now been moved on GitHub which has proven to be extremely effective for us to manage the workflow and we hope to increasingly use it to organise our development cycles and make it easier for you to follow development. Those of you who have used it will no doubt see that new fixes are being uploaded all the time to deal with the issues you are raising.

What will change: StackOverflow is one of our support channels for technical coding support

Our passionate communities have been able to post comments on Facebook, and G+, and we’ve seen traffic steadily rise. The people we’ve tasked to deal with communications have done their best to provide responses to your feedback as quickly as possible.

As was announced, our intentions was for our community support functions to move exclusively to StackOverflow as we were impressed by the community’s ability to provide very technical support to their site visitors.

It was for us a way to support another community whilst allowing us to focus on our prime activity – deliver a stellar content management system that can drive the websites of tomorrow.

StackOverflow and e107 Development Team have had a very friendly chat over the past few weeks focussed on how e107 users should be using and soliciting help from the StackOverflow community and you will have seen that we have updated our guidance in line with StackOverflow’s own mission.

StackOverflow becomes one of the places to go to if you need technical support on the use of e107 legacy platforms. Check out their tour to make sure you're posting questions to things allowed on their platform.

What’s coming soon: a P2P platform for general community support

One of the avenues we announced in our last blog on community support was looking to some intrepid e107 community users to develop an externally hosted solution that could serve as the new community support hub for e107 without it being linked to e107.

We’ve approached some e107 community members to look into whether this was possible, and whether they wanted to take up the challenge as we are keen to ensure you have a friendly place to go to to ask your day-to-day questions about e107.

We’re pleased to announce that our community members have agreed to set something up for us and that the intention is for this new community presence to come online sometime in August next month. As this is being done on a volunteer basis, we are not able to bring this online any sooner but we’re excited to see members pulling together to help us deal with the expressed needs of the users.

We’ll be sure to write a small blog article about the site when it launches and if you want to help out with the project, just be sure to post it on Facebook and we’ll put you in touch with the team developing that site.

Thank you for your patience and we look forward to coming to you soon with some of the first Inspiration articles submitted by the community!