How to “Pay it Back” to MooTools
I get a lot of emails and tweets saying how awesome MooTools is. Sometimes people want to donate money or give us credit on their work in some way. Others ask how they can contribute. If you want to “pay it back” to MooTools, you can do so by:
- fixing bugs in our ticket list (lighthouse)
- submitting patches for bug fixes and features
- writing blog posts about interesting things you learn in the process of developing w/ MooTools
- get involved in our user forums and help those who understand it less than you
- release code you author that others might find useful
We don’t need credit in any overt manner. Your work should be all the credit we need. We would much rather see you involved in the community than any other form of gratitude.
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August 7th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
One of the things that’s always bothered me about Mootools is the community. I’ve spent a lot of time researching the competing frameworks, and have been faithful to moo for a long time now (since 06), but organization is the one thing Moo def. doesn’t have compared to some of the other guys (jquery, yui, dojo).
There are reasons for that (exposure, private funding, etc.), and I’m not faultless in this, but for those of us who want to help and contribute it’s difficult to know where to start. We want a central place for plugins/extensions/classes to go, a central place for us to post these and should demo’s, add documentation, etc.
I’ll be releasing a bunch of stuff hopefully in the next couple months under MIT on code.google.com, but hopefully a central community will come together.
That being said, clientcide is an awesome place for new comers/users to learn more, but a more community driven site would be the icing on the cake of the best client side framework around; that’s not even a subjective statement :)
August 7th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
That was really well said. None the less MooTools is still where its at.
August 7th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Well said, Oliver. The two things Mootools needs as a community is:
1) an official home for additional “More” plugins (with a community review process to allow the best of the best to bubble to the top). The way that Drupal has module projects at their site would be killer.
2) Mootools documentation needs to be a Wiki. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen “that’s not quite right” or “there’s a better way to say that” issues in the documentation. I’d love to help more directly in this way.
Mootools as a code base doesn’t seem to need much more – it’s going in the right direction by itself. It’s the periphery things that need help.
August 7th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Hello Oliver,
Thank you for the post. The community’s plugin repository is in the works and we have Faces of Moo coming soon. Wheels are definitely in motion so stay tuned.
Also, remember: it always starts with asking how to help. :)
Cheers!
David
August 7th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
@Jeffrey: I’d much, MUCH prefer the MooTools docs stay the way they are and not in Wiki format. No offense to the jQuery team, but I like the Moo doc format much more.
August 7th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
@Jeffrey, the community plugins system, which has been “coming” for so long is in testing. It’s slow going, but we’ll definitely have it online this fall. Hopefully this month, but we’ll see. Note that it will be integrated w/ github, so you should push your code there rather than google code.
As for the docs as a wiki, you can push changes to us easily enough if you want to contribute. Fork mootools-core or mootools-more on github, make a change, and send a pull request. You can even make the changes you want right in the browser without having to learn git.
Finally, we will be adding a tutorial wiki to MooTools.net this fall as well. This will basically be the current http://www.mootorial.com to start, but we’ll hope the community chips in to help us keep it accurate and helpful.
August 7th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
The community plugin system and a wikitorial for MooTools sounds really good.
I also like the idea of wiki-fying the main docs, so that we can start documenting some of the currently-undocumented “features” and private functions which are actually really useful. I understand that it’s simple enough to modify the docs using git, but I do think that a Wiki will encourage more active maintenance of the docs because of the easier access.
August 9th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
I’m a bit tired saying it, but this magic central plugin place was already there in early 2008, so I guess you guys just didn’t see it…
So let’s see how the new official thing will (hopefully) rock the community.
August 9th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
@walsh
Most def. i agree with it starting with me/us asking “how can we help?”
This is OS, so community/horizontal organization is really important. Hopefully with this fall’s launch it’ll start to become more involving.