Over the years I have contributed to a fair number of open source projects, but one thing has always bothered me. Not knowing the direction that the developers want to take with a feature, or how they want to handle adding new features. This lack of communication makes some developers less likely to contribute to a project. I think I have come up with somewhat of a solution.
Roadmap.md files
While we are reorganizing our module files and getting them setup to work with the automation flows for the thirty bees store, we will be adding a Roadmap.md file to each module repository. This allows anyone that is wanting to contribute to a thirty bees module to know where we want to go with the module and what new features we are planning on adding over time. It also give users wanting to help contribute code to the modules a list of what can be contributed.
Another good reason for the road maps is to let users know which modules are deprecated and do not require anymore work in their current form. It is unbelievably frustrating to work on something and not know that the developers had plans to phase it out.
We have only begun to start adding the road map files, but hopefully by the end of November (a week) we will have them all added to all of the modules. Some modules will take longer than other because they will need feature testing to see what feature sets are needed to be added to the road maps.
Here are a few modules we have already added road maps to if you are interested in reading them.
Some modules will of course have a lot bigger road map than these modules, especially the blog module and the reviews module, those will have an extensive road map likely, while others might surprise you and be deprecated. In the future we are planning on restructuring some of the modules to clean up the back office and make things work more efficiently.
