Another Year is close to ending, OpenMage is still here, and also Iam still here and supporting the OpenMage Project and its Community.
Now looking at my last Recap from 2018, or the last personal Post from 2019 about the Plan for the time after Magento 1 eol its obvious that I had put less time into these Posts.
Now the thing is that life is constantly changing, new challenges appear, one gets older and everything goes slower and takes more energy, and also life priorities shift.
Also the low amount of donations I could collect via Patreon back then did their part in shifting focus to other things. (Nowdays you can support me directly via Github Sponsors, but thats another topic)
The last few years
One bigger thing I did in 2019 was securing most of the OpenSource Magento 1 modules which were published on Magento Connect. Actually the Downloading was not me, but I wrote a script to publish them all as separate Repositories on Github. And also writing a base to run commands on all of them. Was fun and also challenging. I still remember how the pure number of repositories broke an Overview Page on Github.
in 2020 a bigger part I worked myself on was making the Magento Composer Installer compatible to Composer 2
There were also a few Pull Requests I created in the last few years in OpenMage.
The bigger contributions were probably the non-code ones. For a long time I was doing the Public Relations work, spreading the word and forwarding and coordinating People and especially Contributors and Users. This had as a side effect that people started to see me as the Leader of the Project, despite me not even having a high position in the hierarchy for a long time.
But a healthy Community project needs ways to find a consent on topics without the need for a single Person. In parts introducing the current RFC process did improve this, although the community did not make much use of it yet.
But also with Magento1 going out of support, the pressure to keep Backwards compatibility got lower and I did not feel so much pressure anymore to hold against bigger changes. (less work and stress for me, more freedoms for the contributors)
What I did during 2023
Most of what I did this year was transforming comments and mentions into organized and goal oriented discussions. And while doing this trying to update our central repository for organizational informations and giving more structure into our documentation repository and copying a few things from issues and chats into the documentation.
One part I like to highlight is making transparent how the roles and responsibilities are currently distributed after there were Requests to have turns and more movement there.
The Reason I like to highlight this is, because all the empty ones are often still ending up with me needing to keep an eye on them.
Then recently I created an OpenCollective account after a discussion about options to enable Sponsoring for the Project. For context, the Maintainers discussed Sponsoring options already for over 3 years, but creating a legal entity involves some complexity and effort which in the end nobody was able to follow up on. With OpenCollective this is taken care of, as they legally host the money (but take a 10% fee for it), and then pay expenses on request and approval. But thats better explained on their website.
Anyway, there is still some work to spread the word about it, write a blog post, fill the page with a bit more content maybe, and gather more feedback on the spending plan.
Another thing I still have on my list for this year is for our Website collecting all the User types, their entry points as well as their user flows to better Plan how to organize and link the content.
Thats especially needed to know which content might be not needed anymore on the websites, or which content is still missing.
Programming stuff with Flyingmana 