Last week I posted a survey about openSUSE Connect. Although some answers are still coming and you are still welcome to provide more feedback, let’s take a look at some results. Some numbers first. openSUSE Connect is not really busy website, it gets about 80 different visitors per day. Not much, but not a total wasteland. Related to this number is another one. More than half of the people responding in the survey have never ever heard about openSUSE Connect. So it sounds like we should speak about it more…
Now something regarding the feedback. Most people think that it is a good idea and that it either is already useful or it can become quite useful. But even though feedback was positive, lot of people made various suggestions how to improve it. So what can be done to make it better? Most of the feedback was centred around following two topics.
Social aspects
One frequently mentioned topic was social aspect of the Connect. It is social network, where you can’t post status messages and where it is not easy to follow what are people up to. So it’s kinda antisocial social network. There were people asking for adding ability to share what are they going – add status messages, chat and stuff they know from Facebook of Google+. On the other hand there were people who complained that they don’t want to have another social network to maintain. And the third opinion which I think is something between was to provide some easier integration with already existing social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Google+. That I would say sounds the most reasonable solution.
More polishing
This was mentioned with most of the sites aspects. openSUSE Connect is a good thing, it contains many great ideas, but somehow they are not polished enough. As connect itself. People complained that UI could be nicer and more user-friendly. That widgets miss some finishing touches. So what is needed in this aspect? Probably some designers to step in and fix UI 😉 But apart from that, some widgets could use even some coding touches. So if you don’t like how is something done, feel free to submit patch 😉
Conclusion?
People didn’t know about openSUSE Connect and there are things to be polished. We had some good ideas and we implemented them when we started with Connect. But there is still quite some work left before Connect will be perfect. Work that can be picked up by anybody as openSUSE Connect is open source, written in PHP and we even have a documentation mentioning among other things how to work on it. We can off course just let it live as it is and use it for membership and elections for which it works well. But looks like my survey got people at least a little bit interested and for example victorhck submitted logo proposal for openSUSE Connect! So maybe we will get some other contributors as well 😉 And let’s see how will I spend my next Hackweek 😀