[geeklog-devel] Future of the Forum plugin

[Dirk Haun]

This discussion shouldn't be buried in the bugtracker[1] ...

The Forum plugin is one of the most popular non-core plugins for Geeklog. Unfortunately, it is currently without a maintainer. Since there were some security issues to address, we took it under our wings[2] - so to speak - for the time being.

I, at least, never intended this to be a permanent thing, though. There's enough to do in Geeklog itself and I don't think we should add maintenance for yet another plugin on top of that. In other words, we should be looking for a maintainer or group of maintainers to ensure further development of the Forum plugin, but outside of the Geeklog core team.

Now back to the discussion on the bugtracker: It was about adding support for features that will be new in Geeklog 1.8.0 to the Forum plugin. Which would mean that the Forum would require Geeklog 1.8.0 at the minimum. I don't think this is a good idea at this point. We should try to keep it available for older Geeklog versions, too.

Of course, we could create a branch, but that would then mean twice the amount of work. Which is really too much for us to shoulder, IMO.

So in my opinion, we should keep the Forum backward-compatible for now (nothing wrong with adding features, just make sure they don't require a current Geeklog version). And in parallel, we should be looking for a new maintainer or maintainers to ensure the further and proper development of that plugin. There's a lot to do there and I have some ideas myself (and would possibly be contributing some code as well). We just should get it into someone else's hands again soon(ish).

Thoughts?

bye, Dirk

[1] <http://project.geeklog.net/tracking/view.php?id=1220#bugnotes>
[2] <http://project.geeklog.net/cgi-bin/hgwebdir.cgi/forum/>