How about something like this?
Please no, while itâs conspicuous, it doesnât really fit there (and doesnât really fit in the design). Iâm also not sure if I (as a developer) would react to something like this. Iâm not a designer and I donât know how to do it better at the moment, but that doesnât look very welcoming, itâs more like a warning.
Iâm terrible in design, sorry 
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If you want to highlight the contribute pages, letâs move the link to the right, make it bold, and green.
Looking at the server stats, though, Iâm not sure if that will cause any measurable changes. In the last 30 days, the site git 870k hits. If we ignore the bots and kiddies with their bots trying to break a non-existing wordpress, itâs worth nothing that while the / page got ~70k views, the other content pages are really low in numbers. Compared to that, the blog root page got ~180k views, and the rss/atom feeds collected a total of ~330k views. Based on these numbers, writing a blog post about âWays you can help diaspora*â is probably more effective.
So⌠letâs do both?
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LOL 
Me too 
That looks way better 
Sounds good, if somebody has the time to write a blog post?
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Iâm certainly motivated to improve the project site if people have ideas for it.
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Will be done next Sunday.
What I thought was that just making âGet involvedâ button more visible is not enough, I wanted to add the phrase âDiaspora is looking for contibutorsâ somewhere. Visitors will go to âGet involvedâ only if they are already interested in contributing, while the phrase âDiaspora is looking for contibutorsâ advertises the vacancy and even if the visitors werenât going to learn about ways of being involved theyâll still get the idea that diaspora wants contributors. It may feel a bit more obtrusive but this can actually help to deliver the information to somebody who is interested but may miss it otherwise.
We could update and improve the âWant to help?â section of the home page, and possibly move it further up the page as well. Maybe this order would work better:
Decentralization Freedom Privacy
Want to help? Aspects Features
1. Choose a pod 2. Sign up 3. Join the conversation
In all honesty Iâve long thought the âFeaturesâ section is a waste of time, because the features listed are all copied from Facebook or Twitter. Until we can replace them with really worthwhile features, Iâd quite like to replace that section with something more useful.
While all this is true, I donât think thatâs the more efficient way to do it. First of all, you wonât contribute to a project you never use. So if we want to write this kind of sentence, I guess inside diaspora* is the best place.
However, we should not spam people or change the user experience of diaspora* itself for these kind of messages, especially if it requires a new release to be added (and another to be removed).
You see where I am coming right? This kind of message is exactly why the diaspora* HQ account has been created.
This post calling all coders had many replies, but we donât saw many pull requests at the end of the day. So in my opinion, the problem is not about people knowing we need help, it looks like we can already reach them. The possible improvements are more around helping motivated person to do their first PR. We could for example have a docker image for development, allowing to set up an environment way more easily. We could have our front-end written in ERB which is closer to HTML than haml (I know that was a problem for me at the beginning). Itâs not a big deal of course, but this + this + that and at the end, no PR. So letâs think about how it could be easier to contribute to diaspora* first, and then if it is not enough, ask more loudly.
One difference, however, is that our calls for coders have so far mostly been within diaspora*'s existing community. A blog post would at least be a call for coders to the wider community of coders using the web.
Sure, a blog post is very nice! My point was about having everything ready to welcome and ease the first contribution before doing the call.
Very glad to hear John. Maybe hanging around and giving tips would already be very nice. Check discourse topic and #diaspora-dev on IRC freenode.
Nothing in this thread is about adding a note to diaspora* itself, though. All comments and suggested changes were supposed for the project site, which does neither alter UX nor does it require a release to be changed.
It also would not be âspamming peopleâ, as people who access the project page usually want to get informed about the project.
However, I still think adding a dedicated note is not worth anything. It is probably much more efficient to make the menu item more visible, and revamp the contents as @goob suggested.
And how do you define that point? Having a Docker container?
This is totally off-topic and Iâd ask you to open a new thread if you want to continue this discussion. However. This project needs a lot of things, but money is not on that list. In fact, we have money, but you just canât make meaningful contributors appear by waving a hundred dollar bill. There have been a lot of discussions about this before, and you will be able to find them using the search function here on Discourse.
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Yeah, what do you think about a docker container to set up a development environment quickly?
It could also be useful to take a few minutes to check if the wiki pages for developers are up-to-date.
Iâll read the conversation in diaspora* and your blog post draft as I didnât do it for now.
I am sure I have answered this before ;), but⌠I like the idea, but someone has to build it, and commit to maintaining it. I would rather have no container than a container that breaks in the future. I am aware of GitHub - CSammy/diaspora-docker, where @supertux88 contributed, but I donât know the curren status of the work there.
I have a Dockerfile that I use for building production instances; it could be easily adapted for development (since it strips away all the bits unneeded for production work, just leaving those bits in would be easy). Iâm happy to support it going forward, as Iâm already supporting the production image and the development environment scarcely changes.
Weâd need to define a few particulars about what youâd like in there (e.g., database drivers), and what youâd like to support changing (my image currently takes master, installs everything it needs via apt-get, installs and runs bundler, and finally builds the static content; if youâre modifying the code some of these steps are redundant).
Letâs assume what youâre looking for is just a Debian-based Docker image into which you can mount your source repo from your local filesystem, along with ~/.rvm for your Ruby setup. Inside the image you can run bundler, unicorn, whatever, with a configuration that will compose in redis and postgres. In that case I could probably have something up in the next week or so.
Let me know what you think.
Awesome! IMO a debian or an Ubuntu image is the best as thatâs what most of devs are used to. Probably debian 9, I saw the guides arenât updated at the moment. We tend to prefer PostgreSQL so I would use this DB. Apart form that well, itâs all in the guide. It would also be nice to run some set up commands like bin/rake assets:generate_error_pages and bin/rake tests:generate_fixtures as found in the testing page. Any other ideas what should be done there?
If you have a look at the work by @csammy, you would see that he spent a lot of time thinking about everything that has been said here. Including supporting MySQL and Postgres, and writing a wrapper that enables users to run common tasks easilyâŚ
Also, this thread is not about a Docker image, so if there is a larger discussion planned, please open a new thread, or split this one.
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New topic about the docker dev image there.