With the final release of the current AEC branch soon out of the door, I'd like to take a quick minute to discuss our pricing. I have adjusted it from time to time over the years and with AEC finally mature enough (for my taste), it's time for an adjustment to reflect that as well as some other changes that just make sense.

The bottom line is: Prices will be raised while staying competitive, especially for long-term members, and we will bump the minimum access and support time.

In the past, I have written about depression and boy have the last months ever been depressing. I decided a couple of weeks ago that I would start to eliminate sources of my blue fever and came to the conclusion that I can no longer maintain being worked up about Joomla. To explain that, I must first give you an introduction of how I see our world right now, then talk a little about my thought process about Joomla and finally write about some ideas for the future.

I have talked about this topic in private with a couple of people and resigned from a lot of chatrooms as a result of this. In case you wondered why I dropped kind of silent, this is why.

I am very slow to digest things like this and it is always at a cost to my productivity. I tend to overthink community concerns and end up pondering this stuff for ages - it took me two months to arrive at the point where I could write about it.

I don’t publish this article because I want a discussion, I publish it because I want closure to move on. Feel free to comment, but note that I have turned on approval mode. I don't want any bickering in here.

Also - on the word "community". It seems like almost anybody has their own definition on it, so here is mine for this post:

A Community is a group of people working (often together) towards a similar goal and/or in a similar setting.

I'm now officially back from vacation - I had a very nice and relaxing time and already started to catch up on emails, work and the forums. I'm also preparing for J and Beyond 2011 - so see you all there!

I've brought some more pictures - after the fold.

Just a quick note here - I will be gone for the next week to get a little (yet hardly deserved) time-off and return on the first of May. This is the first vacation in a long time that I won't bring a computer and I have done my best to make sure things don't fall apart while I'm gone - Jake and Aaron will of course still keep that help coming on the Ticket system and Cristina will tend to the Manual, Forums and the Sales Emails while I'm away. There are certainly a number of things that they cannot take over, so if that comes up, I'm afraid you'll have to wait until I'm back.

After the vacation, I will return to working on the 0.14.6 stable and prepare for Joomla and Beyond 2011. Cheers!

So, the past two months I haven't been nearly as productive as I had hoped to be. Why? At the risk of either steamrolling headfirst into the next taboo or sounding like a whiner yet again, let me talk about Depression.

I tell you why there is no "demo" version of AEC: Because it would be wrong.

Lately, I have been getting more and more calls to create a demo package or at least a demo site, enough calls to make me want to put out a final explanation on why I will not do that.

This post will be about four things:
First, me whining. Sorry, it has to happen.
Second, the pathology of the current JED setup, why it is hurting our community and developer ecosystem.
Third, what needs to happen to make the system suck less, in a minimal amount of time, for a huge change.
Finally, why the JED will never be right and why it has to be abandoned and replaced.

I will most probably not do all of this in a proper order. Sorry.

I have prepared this blog post for years now, every time the pain became too unbearable. I have about four or five versions of this shelved - why? Because every time, I decided that it would be better to try to be productive, make suggestions, try to influence the system. Today, I have lost the last bit of that confidence.

I want you to understand that I am perfectly aware of how problematic it is to publish an article like this. What I'm writing about is a trench warfare - between developers, between them and the JED Editors, within the community. I hope you will stay with me long enough to see that I'm not just whining, but trying to establish the bigger picture and offer appropriate criticism and actual help.

I know that it is a long text and I have done my best to make it as entertaining as possible. It's important to me that you read it thoroughly - it would be all too easy to just skim over it, take an excerpt out of context and then become upset about it.

For too many months, the lack of a proper manual has been the biggest issue with our site. While we do have the videos up and a pretty extensive FAQ, a plain manual is what most users want and so far, I could not find the time to deliver it. I did collect ideas over the months, just so that I'm prepared and what you see up there is actually my current stack of cards going into this.

The one on the upper left says "live-blogging the creation of the new manual" and that is what I will do right now. I have the rest of the week blocked off for just doing this and will track my progress and write a bit about my thoughts on the general structure. Hopefully with a lot of neat pictures. Please excuse temporary formatting issues while I do this, I'm trying to keep it as cleaned up as possible.

While replying to comments in the "On Support" blog post, I came to a point where I was replying but actually writing a more broad defense of my earlier statements. Forcing that on just one commenter seemed quite inappropriate.

The negative comments I have received have actually made my point better than I could ever have, especially one that says "it's not what you say - it's what other read in it, that makes the difference". As an example, the same comment claims that I deny responsibility while I say the exact opposite - I try to remind the readers that we can only be responsible for our own actions and that the problem is customers who come to us merely to load their own responsibility onto us (who, for instance, are late on their project, so they seek somebody to blame for that).

It might seem like a small technicality, just a semantic difference. But I have come to find that if the problems I mention in the blog post occur, it's all downhill from there. Acting like that is not as big a problem (or that we should only discuss it in private with the client should it occur) severely underplays its importance.

To me, it is a sign of a very common masochism that many developers, consultants, site builders and knowledge workers show.