CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Great scott!  Marty, there's a public mailing list for developer discussion!  Where we can post messages about release-planning, merge policies, refactorings, UX, design, CMS integrations, and the rest of that techie humdrum. It's called civicrm-dev@, and it runs on regular unleaded gasoline.

Please feel free to subscribe or unsubscribe by visiting:

http://lists.civicrm.org/lists/info/civicrm-dev

"But wait!", you say.  "There is already a StackExchange!  And a Github! And a JIRA!  And a forum!  And a blog!  And an API list! And a partners list! civicrm-dev@ is an ancient artifact from 2004. Why should this reliquary list have any place in the present or the future?"

StackExchange (http://civicrm.stackexchange.com/) is a great venue for asking about a feature, use-case, hook, or API. It provides better tools for finding questions that have already been answered, for rewarding responses, etc.  During 2015, most of our discussions about user-support and developer-support moved from the forums to StackExchange.

Github and JIRA are great venues for tracking and commenting on specific changes. IRC is great for real-time meetings.

The forums had a good run; at one point, they had a great network-effect where they aggregated discussions of user-support, developer-support, development-planning, event-planning, and more.  But StackExchange and Github have taken turf and eroded the network-effect, so now the odds-and-ends are mostly discussed through private email, long CC lists, and mailing-lists (esp civicrm-api@ and civicrm-partner-program@).

I'm inclined to go-with-the-flow on this, and a survey of contributors confirms a preference for mailing-lists.  (About ~50% preferred mailing-list; ~25% preferred forum; and ~25% were ambivalent or undecided.) The civicrm-api@ list is almost perfect (in terms of reaching the right people, having a supportive and open culture), but its scope omits a number of developer topics. Hence: "civicrm-dev@" for any other dev discussion.

"But wait!", you say again. "What about Slack and HipChat and Discourse.org and Gitter.im and MatterMost and Zulip and RocketChat and Matrix.org and IRCv3 and Skype and carrier pigeons?"

They all sound awesome. Of course, each has trade-offs (openness/cost/compatibility/usability/etc), and I don't have time to deal with the administration/communication/migration/support/maintenance. If someone is in a position to organize something flashier, please say so.

For the moment, lists.civicrm.org is a working, known quantity and it's easy enough.

To recap:

• For questions or recommendations about existing features, use-cases, hooks, and APIs, post to http://civicrm.stackexchange.com/
• For most day-to-day/substantive discussion of specific patches and bugs, use http://issues.civicrm.org/ and https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pulls
• For real time chat, use https://irc.civicrm.org/
• For planning discussions and announcements about new or refactored APIs, post to http://lists.civicrm.org/lists/info/civicrm-api
• For planning discussions and announcements about all other development tasks, post to http://lists.civicrm.org/lists/info/civicrm-dev
• For partner discussions about marketing and organization, post to the civicrm-partner-program list
• If you prefer a futuristic, nuclear-powered discussion system and can make it happen, start a thread!