• Hello Fabrik Community

    Fabrik is now in the hands of the development team that brought you Fabrik for Joomla 4. We have recently transitioned the Fabrik site over to a new server and are busy trying to clean it up. We have upgraded the site to Joomla 4 and are running the latest version of Fabrik 4. We have also upgraded the Xenforo forum software to the latest version. Many of the widgets you might have been used to on the forum are no longer operational, many abandoned by the developers. We hope to bring back some of the important ones as we have time.

    Exciting times to be sure.

    The Fabrik 4.0 Official release is now available. In addition, the Fabrik codebase is now available in a public repository. See the notices about these in the announcements section

    We wish to shout out a very big Thank You to all of you who have made donations. They have really helped. But we can always use more...wink..wink..

    Also a big Thank You to those of you who have been assisting others in the forum. This takes a very big burden off of us as we work on bugs, the website and the future of Fabrik.

Fabrik 4 community

EricWebsite

Member
Here, we like to start a discussion channel on the Fabrik forum around a Joomla! 4 compatible Fabrik, currently being developed by a small group of knowledgeable people.
We are trying to create a new home for Fabrik which needs to include documentation & forums not only to provide the same help as the existing Media A-Team community but also to enable any new things the community might want to do in the future.
Obviously, much more is needed like a formal organization for which we are applying for membership of SPI, Software in the Public Interest: https://www.spi-inc.org/, etc.

Please join this group on Discord to follow developments more closely, give you opinion and ask questions, using the same name as you are using here or on Github.

Discord invitation link: https://discord.gg/uSv8DtwZGF

Github: https://github.com/joomlahenk/fabrik
For the status of the development see /wiki/Status-of-plugins
The other wiki pages provide useful information on testing, error reporting, etc
 
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We have a Beta 1 version of Fabrik 4 available for testing
AFAIK there are 3 developers at work with coding and making it available, none of them being an “Eric”.

Has something changed? Who are you? Have you taken over ownership? How?
 
AFAIK there are 3 developers at work with coding and making it available, none of them being an “Eric”.

Has something changed? Who are you? Have you taken over ownership? How?

@henk, @achartier and @troester are all members of the Discord Community - no one is disrespecting their efforts or trying to take credit for the work they have put in. However it takes a lot more than just coders to create a new community. You need organisation, infrastructure (web site etc.) for a forum like this and for documentation like the wiki, people who will deal with the administration (finances - to pay for web hosting and domains etc.). These don't magically happen - and people who like to code often don't want to do this stuff.

Of course, none of that is going to be needed if we don't have a Joomla4 version of Fabrik, so the developers are absolutely key, but a community is a team effort bringing together many different skills.

P.S. I should add that @achartier is a member of the Steering Group (with @EricWebsite, myself, @trip, @felixkat, @lcollong, and @thom - all of whom are also respected members here), and that @henk and @troester have been approached (several times) but have not expressed an interest (which is entirely their choice). Membership in the Steering Group remains open to any member who wants to take a constructive leadership role in creating a replacement community.
 
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As Sophist already pointed out: It takes more than just coders to create a new community. You need organisation, infrastructure (website etc.) for a forum like this and for documentation like the wiki, people who will deal with the administration (finances - to pay for web hosting and domains etc.).
These don't magically happen - and people who like to code often don't want to do this stuff. In other words, a community is a team effort, bringing together many different skills. Anyone is welcome to join the discord group and help work on all these other aspects of creating a lasting community.
 
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As Eric mentioned above, we have been running some straw-polls of the members of the Discord community, and these were counted at 6pm UK time having been open for votes for 2 days and having had several announcements to remind Discord members about it. I am pleased to say that there was a significant majority voting for us to:
  • Continue our discussions with Media A-Team

  • Start building the infrastructure for a Fabrik4 web site and a documentation site. We anticipate that we will have proper forum software in due course (broadly equivalent to this xenforo software) but for the moment general how-to questions (that are not F3/F4 specific) should still be asked here, whilst the development team are providing F4 how-to support on the Discord channel and F4 bug reports via Github issues on the F4 repo. (@henk / @troester / @achartier, please correct this if I have got it wrong)
We were also heartened to receive a significant majority indicating that they have confidence in the current Steering Group which now has even wider representation of the existing membership here as listed above - though of course we need to continue to work towards understanding (and if possible addressing) why a handful of voters felt that they don't have confidence in us.
 
Awesome work, thanks to all involved to get this Fabrik4 off the ground. There is now light at the edge of the tunnel. My upgrade tests have proved extremely positive so far and for the most part, work out the box, and am now not so worried all my clients will be left in the lurch when Joomla3 come to an end next year.
 
I sad to have to announce that @lcollong decided that he no longer wishes to serve on the Steering Group. All the members of the Steering Group online at the time tried to persuade him to stay, but he decided to return to the "back benches". I hope that you will join with the members of the Discord community in thanking him for his help up to this point. We hope that he might change his mind at some future point, perhaps when we are more established and things have settled down a bit.

I am also please to announce that @clivegarnham has agreed to join the Steering Group in his stead.
 
Unfortunately, for reasons known only to themselves, @henk, @achartier and @troester have today decided to remove the source code for the Joomla4 version of Fabrik from @henk 's github repo.

In the interests of openness and transparency, I am going to repost the key messages posted on our Discord server relating to this (times are my local time - GMT). The Discord server is open to all, so anyone is welcome to come and view this conversation there in #fabrik4-devs-only:

18:39 troester:
To end further speculations: We (= @henk @Skurvish @troester , not some Discord group) decided to put the recent Fabrik4 branch to private until the situation (handover of Fabrik3, copyrights, future organisation and funding of Fabrik4 etc.) clarifies. Issues can still be reported on GitHub.

18:44 wezetel:
Thanks for the clarification. As Beta 1 is still available from the wikis tester instructions and any improvements (= issue fixes) can be applied from the pull requests, we still have the up to date code available (if we apply all issue fixes
7c010dc6da25c012643ea22c1f002bb4.svg
). But it would have been nice to tell us a bit earlier, so speculations wouldn't have been necessary (edited)

19:45 Sophist:
@henk, @Skurvish, @troester I am completely confused as to why there is a need to move it to private. I thought that the whole point was to make it available to Fabrik users. And it seems to me that this is an entirely separate issue to what happens to the community. It seems to me that the best option is for everyone to work together to create a new home for the community built around the J4 version, with everyone working together to revitalise both the community and the code, but in the end as long as there is a community that provides support and documentation etc. and a source for a working version of code, they don't need to be together, though I think it is better if they are.

As you know, we are applying to SPI for membership, and part of that will be that they hold the copyright etc on behalf of the community (of whatever copyright you and Robbie are willing to pass over that is).

I have seen no evidence that anyone in this community has anything but the best interests of the community as a whole at heart. There may be differences of opinion over e.g. whether we should hard fork now or continue to try to negotiate with Robbie, or about what we need (and when) to be a full service community, but in my opinion we are all defined much more by our shared purpose then we are by minor differences of opinion on how to achieve it.

So, perhaps you could explain further the reasons that you feel this is necessary because I find this action very confusing to say the least.

21:33 p38: Troester, As @wezetel mentioned, it would have been nice to mention what you folks were doing instead of simply rolling back without informing anyone. My company has spent days working and testing on the Fabrik4 beta as part of our contribution as per your request to get users to test via the Fabrikar site and Github, and now all that has been a complete waste. A real pity you saw the need to do this, as I personally feel much progress has been done in the past few months to determine a way forward out of this Fabrik3 situation that we all find ourselves in. I really hope you would reconsider your decision, but considering it is Henk's repo, I guess he well within his right with what he does with it. Its a real pity that it looks like politics has got in the way of a good thing.

22:29 troester:
"and now all that has been a complete waste" Why? Beta1 is still out, issues can still be posted and we are still working on it.

22:41 Sophist: Beate, you do understand how Open Source is intended to work, and how the GPL operates? Because this literally makes no logical sense if you understand those.

(Happy to provide more detail if anyone needs an explanation of this.)

I am also unclear why you would want to deter anyone else who might like to contribute to the code from doing so?

Perhaps you could explain what issues you think exist that caused you to do this, and explain how you think this action will resolve them.

Additionally, you say that you are going to keep it private until such time as "the situation (handover of Fabrik3, copyrights, future organisation and funding of Fabrik4 etc.) clarifies." I think it would help everyone in the community to understand your intent here if you could please explain what your concerns about these factors are, and what you will do in the following circumstances:

A) The community executes an agreement with Robbie in which we join a mutually agreeable non-profit and copyrights transfer;
OR alternatively
B) The community unilaterally becomes a member of SPI and we do a hard fork and create a separate version?

To avoid any doubt here, by "the community" I mean that the Discord membership as a whole, because as I have made clear elsewhere, this will go to a vote of the entire community and the final decision will not be made by the subset that is the Steering Group.

Edit 1: I should add, again to avoid any doubt, that no one is disputing @henk's right to do what he wishes with his own repo containing the Fabrik4 code. However we do not understand why this group felt it necessary to hide this code, and what they feel they can achieve by doing so.

Edit 2: It would be most unfair for me to finish this with my questions unanswered, so I will commit to copying any answers provided on Discord (assuming that they are not posted here as well by the original author).
 
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We are in need of some funding.
More details.

Thank you.

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