I probably made something not popular, but I decided to add (minimal)
advertisement on all demo pages (using
config.footer.inc.php). You can dislike this step, but if
number of visits for demo server will grow this way, it will soon need
hardware upgrade and I'm not willing to pay it from my money.
If you want me to remove ads, the only way to do it is to donate some amount which might be used for hardware upgrade. In really near future server will probably need more memory.
I see it now on two projects on which I participate - Gammu and phpMyAdmin - they do not attract new developers and old slowly retire.
phpMyAdmin is very widely used tool and it does not help it attract developers. Only Marc is currently active developing, I sometimes commit few lines of code and I don't see much other activity. Isn't among users some skilled PHP developer who would like to improve our code? Or phpMyAdmin already reached perfect state? I don't think so.
There seems to be big barrier in those projects to attract new developers. They both lack developer documentation, what is unfortunately quite usual in free software world. But is it the real reason? It probably discourages people who look at the code and are not able to understand how it works. They could ask on mailing list and they would get some hints, but this is probably too much for somebody who wants to fix some small issue. So this is something which can be improved and might help.
I also thought that open version control system can help also a bit in this situation, but phpMyAdmin doesn't seem to profit much from this. Gammu never had it (except of my own), now when I will be creating releases, it will have it, but I doubt it will change anything.
I'm really out of ideas how to attract developers, and looks like I'm not alone, as I saw recently, KMobileTools have same issue and there are definitely more such projects…
BTW: Anybody interested in improving mentioned projects? Just contact me or any team member :-).
Maybe I'm a bit late, but happy new year! I was quite silent in last days as I was having rest from computer and enjoyed real life.
What will this year bring? I will hopefully become Debian Developer, as only required step right now is account creation. This is good news for Gammu users who run Debian, as I would like to upload testing versions to experimental (as well as appropriate python-gammu builds).
What else? Some new releases of my projects :-). I'm still working on Wammu and configuration wizard. There is a bit more work than I expected, but it should be ready during January. I don't expect much new features in python-gammu, it will be just kept in sync with gammu.
The only remaining project is Ukolovnik, which is in perfect state for me, however other users request more features and I should sometimes get at least to patch merging :-).
This month for first time number of unique visitors on both phpMyAdmin demo and phpMyAdmin wiki has grown over 10000. It looks like phpMyAdmin attracts more and more people as demo server unique visitos constantly grows since time it has been launched.
BTW: If you like this service, you're welcome to send donation to halp paying costs of running.
This morning I enabled new Designer feature in phpMyAdmin demo (currently available only in trunk). It's embeded version of phpMyDesigner which was originally developed as separate product.
Please give it some testing as there might be some problems in integration.
I decided to do finally some work oh phpMyAdmin today. I went through security announcements we (or I directly) received and tried to reproduce and fix them. Now everything seems to be fixed in Subversion and we're going to 2.9.1.1 release today. So if you have time, please test MAINT_2_9_1 branch, to awoid some major breakage :-).
PS: You can also download snapshot.
OpenUsability project has opened some projects to public. None of projects have been chosen as student work (I understand this, as I didn't put there much formal specification), but instead offered as open projects.
This is both good and bad news: Bad news because there is no sponsoring for the usability consultant, good news because the time frame is not restricted to January-April (they may start immediately ;-), and professionals can apply as well as students.
After some complains that users can easilly confuse http://pma.cihar.com with http://cihar.com/phpMyAdmin, I decided to add navigation to top of these pages, so that you can easily switch between all phpMyuAdmin related content you can find on my pages. I only hope I didn't break anything while doing this change :-).
We have two releases today - one fixes security bug in stable branch (2.9.0.3) and one to fix several bugs (2.9.1-rc2). Final 2.9.1 should follow soon if no major problem appears.
I also added MAINT_2_9_1 branch to snapshots and demo server, feel free to use them.
As DocSQL import in phpMyAdmin was quite old and obscure code, I decided to convert it to regullar input plugin. This is now done in SVN, however there is one slight problem - I have only fuzzy idea what DocSQL actually is and I don't have any data to test it (besides those I could guess from plugin source). So I'd welcome if somebody who knows this beast, would give new plugin a bit of testing.