Future of this community

[filippo-groppi]

Is only an impression of mine or this community like others after the advent of AI is almost dead?
I know the strategy of Pimcore is pro/paid info only, but this will not lasts forever. I think Pimcore should also have a base community that shares info. If you look at competitors that have an open version, they have a partner circuit but also a lot of forums, workgroups that shares a lot of info.
Our documentation is extremely lacky about examples, use cases, not updated, and is only developer oriented.
What do you think? What to do?

[Cruiser13]

The community here is not dead in my impression. We are all just very focussed on our projects. Not sure what the advent of AI has anything to do with it.
Can't really say anything about pimcores strategy but developers always need to be paid eighter way.
If the documentation is lacking something in specific feel free to ask - I see that you opened one discussion so far and you got replies there solving the issue. Especially non-developer oriented documentation should be easy to add - feel free to add your own thoughts there, PRs are always welcome in my experience.

Best approach is to go ahead and support the community and you'll most likely get something in return, at least that is my experience.

[dpfaffenbauer]

If you want the community to improve, do something. You are here for the second time and have no contributions at ALL on github and complain about a dead community? If you are struggling with the docs, make PR's to improve and don't complain. DO something if you want change!

[AlephCode]

@dpfaffenbauer I understand that the code for the current Pimcore documentation is not available for making PRs. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would really like to contribute to the documentation with more examples and things that, in my opinion, are not very well explained.

[dpfaffenbauer]

@AlephCode it is here https://github.com/pimcore/pimcore/tree/12.x/doc

[jdreesen]

Also, every page in the docs has an "✏️ Edit this page" link at the bottom ;)

[filippo-groppi]

I understand the point and I apologize if I didn't explain myself well, but my message was not meant to be a criticism of the community, or even of people, but rather an observation from an outsider that Pimcore does not seem to actively encourage information sharing.

I am a new user who is considering adopting Pimcore in the company. I am primarily a designer, a user, marginally a developer, and honestly, for now it seems inappropriate to contribute to Pimcore.

If Pimcore wants more people to participate, why not create a clear guide on how to contribute to the documentation or share examples of use? Videos, tutorials, step-by-step guides fo free? Why not make a separate repository for the documentation? But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The fact that the forum links to GitHub, I don't think it's usable for non-developers.

My criticism is that if there is a vision of a company behind it, it should feed the base, not create a barrier to entry. If the idea is that anyone can contribute, anyone can adopt and use it, it should be easier and clearer to do so. The company benefits from it, we users (non-partners), honestly, do not. If they really want more people to help us, they should at least pave the way, not put obstacles.

If the answer is 'Do a PR and don't complain', it only confirms my impressions.

What I see from the outside is that Pimcore has enormous potential in terms of features, but for now it cannot convince me to adopt it permanently, if it succeeds, I will be happy to share and contribute.

[dpfaffenbauer]

Please also don't understand me wrong ;) A community can only grow together. For it to grow, it needs volunteers who want to change things. I started my journey with Pimcore 13 years ago and I think I somewhat influenced Pimcore and the Community. How I did it? Basically I just did. Why did I do it? Because I love the Vision behind it. I can identify myself with Pimcore. I can understand what they did and I build on top of it to make it even better. (eg. https://github.com/coreshop/coreshop with almost 10k commits)

Pimcore has somewhat OK docs, but it can only get better if it gets active work on and changed by either the Community or the Core Team from Pimcore. There are Videos - that are paid though - in the Academy. They give a very good headstart into Pimcore, the Vision, the Product and the Features. Its paid, cause its honestly quite a lot of work. (Video Tutorials in other Platforms like Symfony or Laravel are Community driven, but also paid ;))

I think Pimcore's vision and path is quite clear. I think they make a very good impression on where they are heading. And your impression might be right. It's not a community driven Project. It is Enterprise. Pimcore is targeting Enterprise. To first of all fund its development and employees and second of all, also their investors wanna see some profits. Thats all good and fine. At the end of the day, you can't buy bread with love and free work.

And since the direction is Enterprise, I think some also feel the community lags behind. Which, in comparison to other Products, is true. But also compared to other Products, Pimcore never had a super huge Community to begin with. If you check today, there is still only a handful of Open Source, supported, powerful Extensions, which mainly come from 2 vendors. If you take a look at my Linkedin Post about Extensions couple of months ago, you can see there is only CoreShop and Dachcom that actually influence the ecosystem: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dominik-pfaffenbauer-50158596_pimcore-extension-downloads-activity-7237390420450672642-j494. Pimcore, CoreShop and Dachcom together own 87% of the Open Source Extensions out there. (Compare that to typo3, wordpress or similar). Talking about paid extensions, you can see even less successful vendors. The only one I know of is actually Blackbit with DataDirector. There might be the one or the other who also sells successful. I only know about them.

If you check the history of Pimcore MVP's (Most-Valuable-Pimconaut), they same names popup all the time. You always see the same faces, for years already now. It is a small community. A small Community that also share Pimcore's Vision and built on top of it.

So, if you wanna be part of that Community, I am happy to have you and help where ever I can. But please, don't expect immediate response, free tutorials or hands-on. Pimcore is far too divided to see that. Pimcore is very opinionated in the way someone uses it. I developed my own style, that I now learn my employees in my Company. Many roads lead to rome and that is especially true for Pimcore :)

BTW: We are planning a Community organized Pimcore Event in Frankfurt Germany in November, you are very much welcome to join there as well. I will share more details later this month.