We’re continuing to use Gitlab (https://lab.civicrm.org/explore/groups) more and more as both a project management and development tool. One area that we’ve been tinkering with over the past several months is using Gitlab for feature requests in CiviCRM. As you can imagine, there’s real potential here to empower the CiviCRM community to create, discuss and promote new features and functionality in CiviCRM. There’s also potential to create a very long, very unorganized list of “to-do’s” that can serve as points of contention should they not be done or rejected outright.
After a great deal of consideration, the CiviCRM Core Team is rolling this capability out officially via the Feature Request project in Gitlab and encouraging community members to review, add and vote on feature improvements in CiviCRM. Though this project is public, meaning anyone can view it, you’ll need to log into https://lab.civicrm.org in order to participate.
We’ve provided a brief overview on how to use the project and will continue to refine the process over time as community members use it. In the meantime, we encourage people to dig into the project and help evaluate future improvements and updates to CiviCRM.
Don’t forget to use the up and down voting as a way to quickly express your support (or not) for a particular feature!
Will this serve as the formal roadmap?
This is probably going to be asked a lot, and the short answer is “no, not officially”. At least, that’s the answer for now. The reasons are many, however suffice it to say that there are a ton of variables to consider when assessing what features should be added, when and why. At the same time, we don’t want to lock the product into any one particular direction without serious consideration, so the core team always reserves the right to prioritize the roadmap.
But, to be clear, the real value here is in 1) identifying improvements that others may not have thought of and 2) to offer discussion in support or against such that the core team can best filter through the requests and determine which have the most merit and could be achieved. So, the longer answer is, “yeah, the feature requests project will help shape what goes into CiviCRM”.
Like a lot of efforts in CiviCRM world, we anticipate that the feature request project will start off slowly. We encourage you to jump in and begin sussing out ideas that ultimately will improve CiviCRM for everyone!
