There has been a (nice) comment the other day about the quality of ZenMagick and the 0.9.6 release.

Whilst I really enjoy and appreciate feedback, reading my response to that comment I can see that typical knee-jerk response that I’ve had a few times lately [and that makes me feel like a broken record].

There is a great discussion about Open Source projects, finding and binding! contributors on planet mozilla (one good example). I have to admin that I do share a lot of their feelings and ace the same issues,  although there is one major difference: ZenMagick does not really have any people contributing to it. Sure, there have been a few cases where people were discussing things on sourceforge, but I do not think that really qualifies as a proper community…

Looking at ZenMagick and all the things I have started implementing and not [yet] finished I do get this gloomy feeling that things are slowly getting too big for a single developer. If nothing changes it might get to the point where I will have to abandon [even more that I do already] some plugins in order to find enough time to work on what I deem important. Bear in mind that this might not necessarily match what the users think.

ZenMagick has always been designed as an Open Source project. There is so much negative feeling about how Zen Cart is managed that, to some degree, it is really surprising to me that there isn’t more interest in more transparent alternatives.

I have never stopped anyone contributing (there has been a single contributed plugin for a while), but so far interest was low or non existent.

I’d really like to change this and get more people involved, because I do believe there is more potential in ZenMagick than can be seen right now. So, if you think you could contribute or are interested let me know. It could be something simple like maintaining a single plugin, improving some of the wiki articles, some artwork or active coding.

If that is too much to ask, please consider what I wrote in response to the comment mentioned earlier:

• blog/twitter about ZenMagick
• write reviews
• post on open source news sites about ZenMagick
• click the ‘I use it’ button on ohlo.net
• spread the word to get more people involved
• as a last resort you could even donate, even though I’d prefer more active involvement

thanks, mano