21.03.2003

Once Upon a Time

Today I had some time to think about the good old past: the first time I got in contact with Cocoon. So here are some facts: It's nearly three years ago.  I started in June 2000 by exploring the differences between Cocoon 1 - which was the current version of that time - and the pre-pre-pre alpha version of Cocoon 2. Although most features of Cocoon 2 were even not implemented, for example the sitemap did not compile well, actions were not defined, selectors were not implemented etc, it became clear that Cocoon 2 would be the way to go. And then a time with real fun started (and I really mean it the way I say). As we started in July 2000 with using the available Cocoon 2 version, we ran into several problems, bugs and missing features from day to day. And we tried to fix each issue and submit a patch to the community. Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely natural, that a project at that stage has bugs and problems. So we knew what lay ahead of us. Although this was a hard time, we believed the community of Cocoon that a first version of 2.0 would be available in November 2000 - now, we know that this was wrong :) The first version was indeed released in November, but in 2001. Then one day, the Cocoon community had enough of my patches ;) and voted me in as a committer! Wow! It became evident that some important parts were still missing, like caching, internal cocoon calls etc. As I already implemented such things for our product called sunShine, I added those things to Cocoon as well. The whole time between June 2000 and November 2001 was really fun, because we acted really like a community (or family if you want). When a problem was detected, you were never alone. Most time, the problem was fixed by working together. And also new things were always discussed by most committers and then implemented. This changed after the first release of Cocoon 2.0 in November 2001, because there were no real itches to scratch. Everything (well, at least the core) was working very well. So, looking back it was a real great time to be directly involved in the development of such a great open source project. Today, it's still fun to be part of the great Cocoon community but I'm really missing the collaboration between the different committers. From time to time two or three committers try to solve together a problem/add a feature but mostly this lasts only for this single issue. But it's still fun even if the weather is not too sunny at the moment. 12:17:49 PM