Keystone and the future #4551
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The situation is very sad. I think the recent activity was just to fix some critical security issues. The version 4 has been in beta phase so long without any real development that it is hard to belive that the situation would change. The sudden stop of the development has also stopped the community because there is no point to make pull requests as they are not merged and nobody knows how the project will continue. If the Thinkmill company who has been involved with the project has proceeded with the development as mentioned here earlier, they must have a private repository because nothing is visible here. Keystone would have become the best JavaScript based CMS and framework if it had been managed better. At least in my opinion, the framework is very well done and the admin UI is one of the key features that other similar projects do not have. I really hope that the project will continue and the stable version 4 is being published soon. But I'm not very optimistic. Are there any maintained forks? |
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I agree @ttsirkia. One of the reasons I was asking was in case it had been abandoned; I don't have much time, but I have a lot invested in Keystone, as I'm sure many people do. I'd be happy to build out a new organization and fork the code, as well as help understand and document what exists now. I just wish that they would say something instead of disappearing and not communicating. This has the potential to be the go to JavaScript CMS, and I'm hoping there are enough people out there willing to help push it to what it could become. To the general community: If this doesn't get any attention from core contributors, please respond here if you're interested in helping to maintain the project. |
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I would definitely like to help this project stay alive! Count me in! If you want to delegate anything to me, I'll do it. I am very much invested and believe there's nothing like it within the open source community. Btw, the 'try the demo app' returns a 'your connection is not private' SSL error on my computer. I am able to access the non ssl url. |
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So food for thought: if this project was forked and managed by another
organization, who will pay for it? who would manage it? What's in it for
them?
I think it's wonderful what ThinkMill has created. I use KeystoneJS all the
time, but I don't use any of the more modern changes in v4 beta. I've been
pretty content to use it as is.
It's always better if a project can be actively managed and improving
through pull requests. But what's the incentive for someone to take on a
large project like KeystoneJS? It's got to be more than desire. There has
to be some financial incentive for an organization to curate the code base,
in order for the project to live on long-term.
…On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 11:31 PM, Elem Shalit ***@***.***> wrote:
I would definitely like to help this project stay alive! Count me in! I am
very much invested and believe there's nothing like it within the open
source community. I noticed the documentation links are broken.
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I agree @christroutner about how to handle the codebase through pull requests, although there needs to be a core team who know the codebase well enough to approve or deny changes. As far as cost, I'd be happy to eat it to get things going (both the site hosting and the github organization), and would make the core contributors admin along with me so we don't get into a situation where an individual has too much control. I'm busy through the end of the month, and feel a few weeks time to let the core team speak up if this repo is not in fact dead would be appropriate. In addition, if this seems like a viable option, I'd like to try to contact Jed and Max first, as well as send a general message to Thinkmill to see what's going on. If we don't hear anything by then, I'll send out a direct message to everyone on this thread and any who want to be involved can talk about how best to proceed. I personally think there needs to be a lull period where we all read through the codebase, compare notes, and fully understand how everything works together before anything can be reliably done, as maintaining the integrity of the codebase should be of the highest priority. Based on what I've seen, there needs to be an early push for stabilizing the codebase and determining what is needed to consider cutting a stable release. Things that I see missing are: clear documentation for the 4.x branch In addition, there are fixes that made it into the 0.3.x branch that have not been ported to the 4.x branch, which will need to be handled. The original team has a ton of documentation and roadmapping here, on their site, in the Google Group, on their Slack channel, in Gitter, and they have a voting app somewhere to vote on the next features to include, which could be leveraged. As of now the people I'll be contacting are: @ttsirkia, @Elemino, @christroutner, @larskarbo, @quitequinn, @bflopez, @dlombard, @hreimer, @MichaelZaporozhets, @gionatan-lombardi, @marconucara, @internetErik, and @igorsamado. If any of you don't want to be included for any reason, just let me know and I'll make sure you're not bothered by the communication at the end of the month. edit: @christroutner, to answer your question about compensation, I'm not sure. I'd put in time because I want to see it succeed, but we can always accept donations for the core team and hosting costs. I'm personally fine not getting paid, but I realize that's not for everyone. I think the initial conversation among the potential core team would need to included what we would all need to feel comfortable putting in the time and maintaining the code. |
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I would be extremely happy to see the beta tag removed and version 4.0 published. The feature set is enough for my purposes. I'm still running 0.3.x and the dependency libraries (Mongoose and others) and Node are nowadays really old. Apparently there are some bugs in the current beta release. I haven't started the migration process to the new version yet because I should be sure that it is a good decision. if the framework is no longer maintained, it might be good idea to re-invent the whole website with another framework. That is, of course, a huge task and therefore I really hope that the Keystone project would continue in some way. |
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I have a few projects that use keystone, and would very much like to help keeping this project alive! I have some spare time coming up and won't mind reading up on the code base |
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I believe Keystone can be very successful financially one way or another. I'll go so far as to say, in the long run, it seems plausible to me that Keystone might be able to provide an ecosystem or a service that will allow non-developers to build and deploy through an admin UI along with its use of modularity. Wherever this project may roam, whether if it stays a developer tool or not, I would be willing to contribute my time and efforts in any way possible. @utoboxer Thanks for stepping up and I'm looking forward to your correspondence. I'll try to do my best and go over the code base to familiarize myself with the ins and outs in the days to come. |
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I'm not confident I have the time or skill to properly contribute to a fork (if it happens) but I am invested in keystone and would like to contribute if possible. |
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I am on the fence of getting my company to commit to KeystoneJS. It really felt like I had found the right tool for what we needed. I was already considering forking the project and maintaining my own version specific for my company. I am willing to help. Side note: The author of the project is still very active on GitHub. Hopefully we can get him to chime in. |
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Of course it is the best alternative that @JedWatson continues the development. And that would be a natural choice because Keystone seems to still be one of the key components of the ThinkMill company. Hopefully we hear something from them soon. |
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I couldn't agree more @ttsirkia, I'd love nothing more than for @JedWatson, @mxstbr, or someone else from the core team to come here and let us know the project is in good standing. If that's the case, we can all happily go back to contributing as maintaining a project of this size could be a considerable commitment. Most of the conversation above is centered solely around the case where no one responds. |
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@autoboxer Count me in. I have not officially contributed to the KeystoneJS but I've used it and ready to spend some time and money to continue the development |
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I am also willing to help with various fixes, small tasks, though I'm not yet experienced enough to be able to contribute actively to a fork/this repository or oversee if a PR is good to be included.. Since I started using Keystone last summer for a project I always hoped for the project to continue, however since there were virtually no new features or PRs included it became kind of necessary to develop custom functions - on one of those occasions I messaged @mxstbr on Twitter, and regarding a possible involvement in the project he stated that he was not part of it anymore and unfortunately couldn't help me. (at least it seemed to be the case on Oct 5, 2017, hope it's not a problem writing this here) |
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While it's disappointing to see keystone neglected, I'm yet to find anything I can't do and can't live without using keystone. i'll be hoping it has a renaissance this year, but even if it doesn't, i'll still be recommending it and using it, albeit forked, myself. |
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I'm trying to migrate from Wordpress to Keystone in order have everything in the Node environment, but I need some important features to really do that in all my projects. Some of these, like nested lists or custom fields, are totally still or the PRs are blocked. I've started to read the codebase and'll be happy to actively contribute, count on me too. |
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Excellent initiative. I have not contributed to the KeystoneJS, but I would like to. |
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Would love to see Jed and other core contributors continue to lead this project, so I hope to hear from them soon. If we do hear back, maybe the core team can somehow take advantage of all of this interest in people contributing and help a bunch of us get set up do to so. @autoboxer If there is a fork, I am interested in contributing. |
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it's so nice to see so many people invested, and I definitely feel more comfortable in my Keystone-dependent work seeing so many people respond so quickly. I'm keeping a running list in a comment above of everyone who mentioned the possibility of contributing or added to this conversation in a serious way. In an early effort to get the team involved, @JedWatson and @mxstbr were mentioned in comments, and if anyone else knows others who would be worth reaching out to, please post those names here so this gains visibility with the core team. I'd like to make sure we do our due diligence first instead of making assumptions as to the project state as there are still avenues to check. As I said before, around the end of the month I'll be reaching out to Thinkmill if we don't hear anything. |
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While I no longer work at Thinkmill (and thusly can't give any official response regarding the current maintenance of Keystone), I know that Thinkmill built all of their projects with Keystone at the core and is very passionate about it. I highly doubt they switched away or are using something else. Most likely, Keystone just works as-is for them, which is why commit activity has slowed down outside of security patches. (on top of them most likely being super busy with commercial work) |
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I would like to contribute somehow... KeystoneJS cacth me when I was looking for a good NodeJS CMS for my personal site. I was developing a local version of my site with keystonejs on my notebook.. I was reading a little the codebase... |
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Thanks for opening this issue @autoboxer, and everyone here for the attitudes expressed. It's really heartening to hear that people find so much value in something we've created, and are so interested in seeing it continue. I'm going to try and address as many of the points as I can, and help move things forward. @christroutner expressed an insightful point:
We (speaking as a co-founder of Thinkmill) have used Keystone in most of our projects over the last few years, and that's helped us continue to develop and maintain it; even including periods where we've employed people (like @mxstbr - miss you buddy!) full time to focus on it. However, it's also been a labour of love. I (and others) have poured countless hours into it just because I wanted it to exist. There have been evenings I've worked until early morning coding, triaging issues and PRs, or skyping with contributors around the world. But over the course of years, and with a new child, that ended up not being sustainable. Meanwhile, many of the things we do at Thinkmill evolved and Keystone as-is has been both enough (in terms of features and maturity) and not enough (in terms of bigger features that have proven hard to build into the current v4 architecture). Because of this, unintentionally, we've ended up doing a lot of work around Keystone instead of being able to contribute into it; which, as a business that's grown from 5 to 20 people over that time, has made it hard to give the project the attention we've wanted to. What we want to do is not just deliver on a solid release of keystone 4, but also be looking at what we want to make 5 6 and beyond, so it remains the go-to node CMS. We've been trying to work out what to do about this, and what the future looks like, and I've erred on the side of not saying anything (while having long internal discussions about it) because I don't know what to say yet; I'm sorry to everyone it happened like that, because I know it hasn't been good for the community. So here's what I need to say: We haven't actually abandoned Keystone, just done a terrible job of communicating what's going on and empowering others to be involved. So we're fixing that, starting today. As has been pointed out, v4 should have been out of "beta" ages ago and, functionally, has been for a year. It needs to be cleaned up and published so we can move forward. We'd like to bring in new admins and maintainers from the community to help organise and do the work of finalising v4, and continue maintaining it into the future. Basically, what everyone's talking about here - but without the need to fork, and with our support and involvement. I'm happy to say that @Noviny is stepping up as community manager on behalf of Thinkmill, so I'm going to hand over to him to outline the plan from here. |
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Great, thanks @JedWatson for the answer! |
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I think this is the best possible situation if Thinkmill has both commercial need and desire to develop it further. As seen in this thread, there are many developers who are willing to contribute to this project, which makes the framework even better for all. Of course this requires some management to lead the project and go through issues and pull requests. For me this was clear indication that updating from 0.3 to 4 can be started and in some point, the repository with the current features but up-to-date dependencies are available. After the version 4 is officially released, community can again start to contribute as we know that there are not any major changes coming soon which would break all PRs. |
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@JedWatson and @mxstbr, thank you both so much for taking the time to reach out here and add clarity to the conversation. @JedWatson, the news you gave is, in my eyes, the best possible for the community, and I'm sure everyone here is thrilled that Keystone is in fact still active. Hopefully this thread shows the willingness of the community to help with the next steps, and @Noviny, as you transition into community manager, please let us know what you need as I'm sure many here will be willing to help along the way. |
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@JedWatson Thanks a lot for your input! I am happy to hear the Keystone is still actively used and that Thinkmill will keep putting effort to improve Keystone
If I may @Noviny & @JedWatson , what kind of features are we talking about? Is a partial re-architecture of Keystone is considered for post 4 releases? |
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I think that an updated roadmap would be great now. For me, the missing key features are nested list, custom fields, subpages/pagetree and multi languages but I'm curious about your ideas about that. |
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Hey all, thanks for the support. It's been really heartening to see people wanting to carry this forward, and I'm looking forward to helping us all do that. My starting focus is going to be on getting KS4 released, and what we need to get there. I'm going to start with @autoboxer's list today, and work on setting up a project for us over the weekend to help us organise who is looking at what. Here is the list @autoboxer had, and where they're at:
What I'm going to be doing next:
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Just a quick note to say I updated the title of this issue to something I hope now better reflects the outcome. Happy to leave it open until we've actually got some momentum towards the steps @autoboxer, @Noviny and myself are discussing though. |
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My four priorities in approximately the order of importance are:
1 and 3 are big tasks that are going to require concerted effort to resolve. I'm going to be using spectrum to talk about these, and working with @autoboxer to get these resolved. We can't get 4 out of beta until these are done. 2 and 4 are better suited to short bursts, and pickup work. I'm going to be trying to resolve at least one PR an evening. I'm likely going to be working newest to oldest. 2a is cheekily inserted as an aside on 2. This means making a clear documentation for a contributor to replicate and solve their problem int the test app so that a reviewer can easily follow it, as well as looking at better tooling for devving. 5 I want to push to https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone/projects/2 for now while we get 1 and 3 done. I'm going to be using spectrum as a place to chat about things, rather than slack, as access is easier, and we can start new topics easily when we want to split them. |
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@Noviny I would be willing to contribute covering the cost of slack, set up an easy way to join, and organize slack to prevent all interested parties from having to roll in yet another messaging platform. If interested in the contribution let me know. |
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@Noviny Im an experienced FE (6+ years of experience); Im really looking forward for keynote to keep pushing as THE CMS for node. Any channel (slack?) where I can collaborate ? Please, let me know if I can help somehow :) |
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@Noviny I can have a person in my team help with the work. I would like to see Keystone 4 stable/ documented so that we can base our applications on it. Can we chat to understand how we can collaborate ? Thanks ! |
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any updates? |
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as a new user, it's sad to see the momentum dead again. Would be great some of the main contributors can lead or at least respond to the questions regarding future directions. I understand people have busy schedule, but it's just sad to see an awesome project die :| |
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A tip for those frustrated by the lack of community. I've been researching
alternatives to KeystoneJS and the only thing that comes close is Strapi:
https://strapi.io/
They have an Admin UI similar to Keystone, but they are in Alpha and things
are still pretty buggy. Still, they have a pretty active community.
I've personally moved away from Express-based web apps (like Keystone) and
adopted Koa. I'm currently using this koa-boilerplate for the new web-apps
I'm building:
https://github.com/adrianObel/koa2-api-boilerplate
Except I've forked it and removed Babel as a dependency:
https://github.com/christroutner/babel-free-koa2-api-boilerplate
The Koa boilerplate is all about simplicity. No overhead of an Admin UI or
other 'features'. It's about starting small, clean, and going from there.
It also lends itself well to test-driven development (TDD).
Food for thought.
…On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 2:29 AM, Eddie Xie ***@***.***> wrote:
as a new user, it's sad to see the momentum dead again. Would be great
some of the main contributors can lead or at least respond to the questions
regarding future directions. I understand people have busy schedule, but
it's just sad to see an awesome project die :|
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I’m still messing around with it but Meteor With SimpleSchema, Collections2, and Autoform also seems to be a decent replacement. |
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@autoboxer @Noviny Did you guys manage to work on recreating some momentum on this ? Thanks ! |
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loopback I've heard has a perverse incentive to not keep their software up to date or provide much of an upgrade path between major versions. I'd recommend https://www.apollographql.com/. It's worth a look. And then perhaps build out an admin panel like https://activeadmin.info/ or https://djangobook.com/django-admin-site/ |
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@morenoh149 https://adminlte.io is really nice. Theres a decent meteor package out there that already integrates with it. |
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I created ConnextCMS (http://connextcms.com/) which combines that AdminLTE
template on top of KeystoneJS.
…-Chris Troutner
On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 10:11 AM, Al Connelly ***@***.***> wrote:
@morenoh149 <https://github.com/morenoh149> https://adminlte.io is really
nice. Theres a decent meteor package out there that already integrates with
it.
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Anybody have any solid info of if the core group that initially wanted to jumpstart the project back up is still progressing? Or if the interest is stagnant again. |
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@TerrenceRC all you see in this thread is all there is. You could ping all participants of this thread and try to contribute to a keystone fork or some other effort. Fundamentally thinkmill has retained commit access to keystone. It's completely within their right to do so but have not had the bandwidth to push the project forward themselves. |
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It's just sad for keystone :( FYI: Strapi looks promising. I've been experimenting with it for a couple of weeks, and I like it a lot. |
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I'm still using KeystoneJS for a few small production sites but the recent lull in activity has gotten me to discover some of the newer "Headless" CMSs. I'm actually pretty impressed with the idea of using a static-site generator like GatsbyJS and being able to pick and choose the CMS that works best for a project (paid/open source). Particularly GraphCMS and NetlifyCMS. I also like the approach since development more closely mirrors how I'm currently working on ReactJS mobile/native apps. For anyone interested, I created a simple starter/boilerplate for integrating GatsbyJS with GraphCMS or NetlifyCMS. Check it out if you want, I will probably be converting a couple smaller Keystone sites to this as a test. GraphCMS version with in-place editing (master branch) NetlifyCMS git-based CMS (netlifycms branch) |
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Clearly another update from me is overdue. After spending a couple of months trying to pick up the roadmap, we've realised that it's not really working - there is so much technical debt in the current state of the project that we're spending more time churning than actually making progress. Also, to be honest, Keystone <= 4 was written for how we wanted to build web sites and apps in node.js back in 2014, and things have come a long way since then. Having accepted that, we're splitting into two efforts: one will simply clean up the last release of 4.0, remove the The second effort is to re-implement Keystone in a completely modern architecture. Including a using a monorepo, ES2018 (Node 8+), webpack, React 16, GraphQL and Apollo. We're tackling the problems that were previously really hard to solve (like custom field types, etc) up front so we don't end up with the same issues down the track. I'm not clear how we'll deal with the cut-over to the next version yet; trying to hold on to backwards compatibility has been a mistake (that I take responsibility for) and has seriously hurt the project. Our focus right now is to get rid of everything that's holding the project back and making it hard for people to contribute, then we'll deal with the upgrade path when we know what the future looks like. For the record, if there's something else out there that works for you, please - use the best tool(s) that you can find for whatever you're doing. This is open source, not a competition 🙂 For me, I am feeling really good about this reboot. I honestly haven't enjoyed working on Keystone this much in years, and I look forward to sharing it with everyone who's still interested when it's ready. |
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Thanks @JedWatson for your thoughts! In my opinion, using minimum effort to publish 4.0 with up-to-date dependecies would be the best choice in the near future so that it is possible to update old KeystoneJS 0.3 projects which run only with ancient Node versions. Then, a clear announcement that no major feature updates or changes are coming to 4.0 and the next version might be completely rewritten at some point when the roadmap is clear. The version 4.0 has been waiting the final release so long that it starts becoming obsolete sooner or later. |
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While @morenoh149 might not represent the core team, I'd say the sentiments are felt by the rest of the non-core team.
It's easy to keep popping in with a message once in a blue moon that things are progressing behind the scenes. In your teams defence, they probably are. But you have open source developers ready to help code or promote the project, and no way for them to do so. For all purposes, this project looks dead.
If you're rebuilding from scratch, cut your losses and put 100% of the team on that. With the speed that tech moves, whatever you publish at this point is going to be obsolete anyway. Also, prioritise the pathway for community involvement above all else.
It may not be a competition in your eyes, but open source projects need a decent mind share to stay healthy.
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I've been mostly silent from when I joined the Keystone team until now as I was trying to work out exactly where I would be helping with the project, and didn't want to overstep my bounds early on. It's clear that communication needs to improve on this project, and the frustration from the community is real and should be addressed. I started this issue back in January based on the frustration I felt, and the fact that I had projects reliant on Keystone but wasn't sure about its longevity. Based on wanting to address all of our frustrations but not being able to, I've requested that on top of helping with code, Jed allow me to act as a second community manager, and he was willing to let me take on the role. I'm hoping this message acts as the catalyst for strong community involvement and transparency that Keystone would benefit from moving towards, and I'm going to do my best with the limited time I have to help make that happen. As a first step, I've been made an admin of the Slack channel, and want to move the conversation there to shorten the response time and start a dialog about what's needed. I'm listing my personal email below for everyone here, and everyone who reads this issue in the future, please use it to request access if you don't already have it. I'd like to spend my time as a community manager bringing everyone together to discuss everything from how people can help to what we need to do to get useful information into your hands, as well as freeing up time for the folks at Thinkmill to focus on code and gathering community feedback and requests for them. I've never taken on a role like this and am excited to help Keystone thrive moving forward, but will need all of your help figuring out the best way to do that. Hopefully I'll see you on Slack and we can take the next step together. for invites to Slack, email me at [email protected] |
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Graph.cool is really awesome. So are we going to have a back-backend for making our schemas/relationships like graphcool and then a backend for editing the data? and can takeCRUD components from the backend into the frontend with react? Shutup and take my money Jed! Look forward to the reboot! |
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As mentioned in the follow-up discussion on #4638 (aka "What's the state of Keystone (again)"), more contributors have recently been onboarded (👋) and we're working to get the project to a healthy state with more timely & effective communication, additional contributors, and a Keystone 4 release without a beta tag. There's now an open invite for anyone interested to join the KeystoneJS Community Slack for feedback and discussion. Join the KeystoneJS Slack and introduce yourself! Regards, |
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Is there a codebase for the reboot? |
and others
Activity on all channels related to this repo ( Slack, Gitter, and here ) seem to have dropped off a while ago, picked up for a brief moment a few months ago, then dropped off again. There are many people in the community who are reliant on this repo for projects they're working on ( myself included, I just spent almost 4 years building a 30,000+ line codebase for a local adoption agency on Keystone ), and we need to know how to proceed with our work related to this repo. If this is still active, please let us know and start communicating, there are many people who need to know.
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