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Financial Incentive for plugin developers
#1
I know this is somewhat of an off beat thought but I have been using the GS engine for a while and notice that new plugins and plugin updates are a rather rare happening.

I really believe that GS has potential to be on par with CMS systems like Wordpress and in my own opinion I believe GS can already do everything Wordpress can if people would just take a deeper interest in the CMS and really work on plugin enhancements that it could exceed Wordpress all together.

The biggest thing I hear from everyone is "Wordpress is so easy, its admin i fantastic and great and is the greatest thing since The Beatles went on tour". They love it because they dont have to put any effort in to the CMS because changing a design is as lazy as clicking the "Install a template of somebody elses work so my site looks like 10,000 others on the web button"

Fact is the GS admin has Wordpress already beat on ease of use. It can take days to integrate your own design with Wordpress and with GS that integration takes less than a couple hours over a lunch break. You can take a wordpress template and convert it to GS and minus the various Wordpress functions the template works like a charm.

I would simply like to see a stronger interest in developing quality plugins and extensions for the web app such as creating a blogging platform that is well integrated, seo optimization plugins that actually work, sliders, galleries and whatever else a developer could come up with and everything having complete documentation readily available without 404 not founds.

I am fully aware that everything GS is about is open source and community driven but I would like to know if a small financial incentive to contribute and grow extend would light any type of fire under plugin developers? Im not talking about template developers, those are a dime a dozen, im talking about actual useful plugins.

Im just talking about a small incentive to make the contribution. If a plugin gets popular then the traffic to that developers web site would already be a means for him/her to grow.

I was thinking of something similar to a community voting system which I would even be willing to back myself where when a developer releases a plugin the community would download and use it as normal, if the GS devs feel it that it is of quality it would get released to a voting pool where everyone at the GS site could vote on its quality and usefulness after a week or so the votes would get tallied up and if they exceed the required score then the reward would simply go out to the developer.

It obviously would not be anything major or life changing but could be based off a quality scale ranging from $10 to $75 or $100 bucks. Or maybe even holding a plugin development contest and award such amounts in the prize or something.

These are just thoughts, I dont know how viable something like that would be but I know I would like to see more than just new template releases hit extend once in a while.
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#2
sliders, galleries that's mostly jQuery and does NOT need plugins except maybe if wanting to put friendly user inputs for the slider or images in the admin panel instead of directly editing page code.

Wordpress is fantastic but it's A LOT heavier then GetSimple... GetSimple imo classifies as a Micro CSM or MCSM and they are currently not in great abundance yet. They have their target market which imo is different than the target market for WP candidates. If I want a massively extensive CMS I would go with WP... but if I want fast, super lightweight, and MySQL FREE I'll go with GetSimple hand over fist.

Please realize that WP and GS are in a sense ENTIRELY different and each have their strengths and weaknesses. But if I have a choice to use WP or GS for a small ~20 page website I'll go GS every time. The deployment is incredibly fast and guess what.. NO DB needed! and GPLv3!!! You can always add in other software like MyBB if you need a forum. For massive blogs I'd still use WP... but for clients who need just a small functional site with a backend admin panel.... holy crap GetSimple is the way to go!

I personally don't think GS needs a ton of plugins like WP... because if you start adding enough plugins there's no point to using a MCMS anymore... plus besides... GS doesn't need to compete with WP... GS is in a whole league of it's own.

Also... open source is open source... I don't like the idea at all of mixing in money in an open source community just to boost development of 3rd party extensions... 3rd party extensions come more often as demand increases provided there's a developers who love the product. Just look at MyBB... I believe one day it will over come even the prestige of vB in being the world's leading forum software (more and more of the largest growing forums emerging are MyBB, not that says a lot other than being able to handle even the largest communities eg HF)... anyway I got off topic... I just really think part of the OP is missing the boat for what GS is really about.. and that's being the best MCMS on the net. I mean no DB... only a few files and folders... XML... PHP... and holy sh*t GPLv3! nuff said.. it's perfect.
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#3
Yeah I do not know how this would work. Other than a donate link somewhere.
NEW: SA Admin Toolbar Plugin | View All My Plugins
- Shawn A aka Tablatronix
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#4
Just an Idea:
Could make a request forum for plugins/themes.
See this forum for this idea in action:
http://community.mybb.com/forum-73.html

This way individuals have a formal and obvious place to make a paid request.
I've had a few MyBB plugins developed for me this way. It works.
I've only had one bad apple who was promptly banned, but other than that I know going about it that way works if there is any sort of demand for custom plugins.
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#5
There is a thread for this but not a whole forum. I do not think our user base is large enuf yet for a bounty system to be profitable.
NEW: SA Admin Toolbar Plugin | View All My Plugins
- Shawn A aka Tablatronix
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#6
Well, I tried to do this with themes, but it was not good enough...
http://get-simple.info/forums/showthread.php?tid=3749
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#7
Wink 
I'll release themes, I'm doing one right now with Foundation 3 CSS frame work (theme is completely responsive). If people like it I'll release an upgraded version on Envato.
Here's a preview anyway:
   
(oops, looks like attachments don't work on the forums or there's an image size limit during parsing)
so here's image hosted on imgur:
[Image: Uyn8qpdl.jpg]

Only like 5% done.. lol ;P

We just need more people knowing about GetSimple CMS and trying it...
it's awesome.

I was so excited with GS that I stopped development of my MyBB/WP Foundation Hybrid theme to focus on making one for use in GS.. that's how awesome I think GS is.

I don't need to get paid just to start an idea... that's not what contributing to open source is about imo...

Just need like more smashing magazine articles or something like that about GS... the more buzz the more will come to try and then realize it's potential for small website deployments.

side note:
500KB for attachment limit on this forum is sooooo tiny Tongue
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#8
looking great
NEW: SA Admin Toolbar Plugin | View All My Plugins
- Shawn A aka Tablatronix
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#9
thank you, it's got a long way to go. Kudos to whoever fixed the forum attachment parsing!
I'm eager to find a solution for an html purifier option for user input in my themes plugin. I'm making the slider and other parts of the template define-able from admin cp>theme>theme options so a user doesn't have to edit the actual template file at all. Also wondering it shortcodes can be made for users via the same plugin... I'm getting way offtopic OP, sorry, I'll talk about this in another thread. Tongue
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#10
(2013-02-13, 13:01:15)WebDevandPhoto Wrote: Just an Idea:
Could make a request forum for plugins/themes.
See this forum for this idea in action:
http://community.mybb.com/forum-73.html

This way individuals have a formal and obvious place to make a paid request.
I've had a few MyBB plugins developed for me this way. It works.
I've only had one bad apple who was promptly banned, but other than that I know going about it that way works if there is any sort of demand for custom plugins.

Once upon a time on GS website there was a standalone page with notice board for those, who were looking for webdevs, and willing to pay for extras (plugins, custom edits and so on). But it was far away from becoming popular.

As you mentioned, this is a microcms for web cards and simple websites.
So is its management allowing to maintain own website by a non-tech people.

ps. Mike developed a shortcodes plugin.
I'm wondering if a theme couldn't come with a plugin dependency list, so that a user would be prompted to install additional plugins to get 100% theme functionality.

btw. latest WP version (3.5?) became a hosting-killer.
It eats so many server platform resources, that people started to blame their hosting providers for low performance. But forgot, that their old WP < 3.5 instance worked way faster on the same accounts couple days earlier Wink
Addons: blue business theme, Online Visitors, Notepad
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#11
Do not use htmlpurifier it is a beast.
NEW: SA Admin Toolbar Plugin | View All My Plugins
- Shawn A aka Tablatronix
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#12
@yojoe thank you yojoe

(2013-02-15, 05:10:53)shawn_a Wrote: Do not use htmlpurifier it is a beast.
Yea I agree, lol. But do you have any other recommendations then to provide some kind of dummy proofing to user input (html code) in the plugin's fields? I'm kind of at a loss atm for ideas and htmlpurifier seemed a last resort but viable option.
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