Things I’d like to have prioritized/funded to get them done:
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improve documentation further. The last effort was awesome, but there’s still some things to improve! For example there are a couple of “Draft” articles and e.g.
https://docs.neos.io/cms/manual/using-neos-with-php-flowleads to a “page not found”, more videos (even more introductory than the current ones)… -
create a process for the new documentation (docs.neos.io) that is sustainable/workable for every contributor. Currently AFAIS it involves reaching out for an account, going into the Neos backend and writing the documentation there, asking for a review, until it is published eventually. This is a lot of manual steps and jumps to make and most importantly, it’s fully disconnected from the development cycle. While this has benefits (make writing documents accessible to non-devs), it likewise currently has the drawback of making writing docs less accessible to devs. Optimally, both would be possible. So IMO we need a process where one can just write some md/rST that is checked into the code together with a new feature to explain it on a very basic/low level, which then gets automatically fetched and rendered in the existing docs.neos.io side by side with manually written docs. This base documentation can then be enriched with a manual written page, that references back to the git versioned feature documentation.
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invest some time/fund into improving our operations processes - namely automated testing, code quality assurance and release management. While this currently “works” thanks to the awesome work of a few, it is still a bit fragile. A bunch of the TODOs is already tracked under https://github.com/neos/release-process/issues
The upmerging process could be improved and half-automated, so that anyone can at least start an upmerge process with a button click and that requires review/intervention only on merge conflicts. The process of releasing a (at least patch-level) version, could be more or less fully automated, maybe only requiring a final “approve” review (and adjust) for automatically generated release notes (strip contribution template artifacts from PR messages, generate and create a PR with the release notes doc that once merged, tags a new patch release and maybe even prepares a discuss post/announcement). -
make the product (Neos CMS) more accessible for the typical target group of a wordpress homepage with content editing capabilities for the customer. This involves (roughly in order of importance):
- easier installation on shared hosting, possibly independent of composer (yes, I know - but wordpress wouldn’t be so successful if it depended on a composer install though)
- more options for base installations that just fulfill basic users’ core requirements (Roland wants to create a couple of templates, which is a great step! Templates to get people hooked on Neos)
- providing a set of base content elements/node types that are well documented so they can be easily adjusted even by non-proficient web devs
- (optional) interactive guide through the Neos backend for first-time users with something like http://bootstraptour.com/