Sponsored App Creation

marcusquinn

Just spotted this: https://cla-assistant.io

as a merge prerequisite on: https://github.com/outline/outline/pull/939

Just pinging I here for reference in case Cloudron wanted to incorporate a CLA for code contributions.

girish

Lol, . Sorry, I totally misunderstood. It's fine to discuss things here as long as it's not too off-topic and still Cloudron related.

plusone-nick

This is a very interesting and applicable concept, +1! We have the platform and the support on the Cloudron side, the gap is being able to tap additional talent in a uniform manner coupled with focusing the users/paying customers resources on said talent.
The same reasons companies/people flock to Salesforce.com for its "ecosystem" from the customer to the developer... The current feature set obviously but also because each time a customer pays for BASICALLY anything "custom" SFDC gets to re-purpose the efforts and make a "new product"..We can achieve the same or better =p especially since the upstream projects are already OS I have some additional ideas on this & would love to be involved N make this come to fruition =]

marcusquinn

Could be another way to do this or at least inspiration: https://www.bountysource.com

marcusquinn

We can sponsor the following for anyone wanting to get paid to package?

Need these to migrate over our current instances:

Need solutions for:

Looking at the current rate of App packaging and launch on Cloudron, I can only guess all this might take 5 years unless there's something I'm missing.

So many great Apps but I'm not getting any closer to app system consolidation without having a bunch of these. How can we speed this packaging process up?

Sorry, I'd love to learn and do but just can't neglect current duties right now. What I can do is divert a bit of budget if that helps.

If the community here is in a similar position, perhaps we can have a whip-round and contribute to recruiting for this?

I also have some seriously decent privacy-conscious client potential for all of this - but we have to dog-food anything before we can promote it.

Very happy with Cloudron - all features definitely going in a great direction - but how do we get more Apps into the Store faster? That App Request list is going up faster than down.

marcusquinn

The way I see this is that every App is free marketing for Cloudron. I can't be the only person that's got to many VMs and App requests from a team that just wants the Apps so they can focus on setups, development and usage.

Every App that gets added to the App Store, ask the forum community here to then go and post on those App communities to point their users at Cloudron to give it a try.

I can't think of a better organic marketing strategy beyond this forum TBH.

I'll happily post links all over the internet to Cloudron to help you grow - but I'm kinda stuck a bit while our infrastructure consolidation needs are in-limbo.

marcusquinn

@girish @nebulon I wonder if would help to have a Group for those that are willing and able to offer App packaging services?

https://forum.cloudron.io/groups

I'm a fan of role-based systems, and maybe the forum Groups can help make the community a profitable way to share business too?

girish

@marcusquinn Sure, can create one. What would be best way for a person in this forum to get into this group though ? I am happy to make you a mod of that group as well (if such a role exists in nodebb)

marcusquinn

@girish I guess just have a thread for it and let people request that role if they are into packaging.

Could be easier to @mention a group if there's Qs specifically for those with that experience.

Just thinking to work with what we have so your focus is preserved for your roadmap.

plusone-nick

Ive got a good conceptual grasp on cloudron but am not able to yet package. I AM able to sell and support and would love for this community to have the ability to pay for & reliably find engineers to package apps that clients want =]

marcusquinn

Noting none of the apps I've listed above are listed here: https://forum.cloudron.io/tags/wip

May I ask for some business consideration in the App wishlist priorities? There are some significantly valuable apps in my list but I'm currently without the spare capacity to assist directly.

Anyone else here interested in these apps? Particularly Odoo, Directus, NodeRed. All apps I think the community would find very valuable too.

plusone-nick

@marcusquinn i second Directus & NodeRED, Odoo would also be useful!

girish

I tried to get https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/directus-app going here, let's see.

marcusquinn

@plusone-nick Odoo has the best accounting module of any FOSS app I've ever tested.

It's a solid alternative to Xero / Quickbooks / Salesforce / Magento / Wordpress etc. I have a feeling it will be as popular here as Nextcloud seems to be, and it has Nextcloud integrations.

Pivot tables on everything is a killer feature — a surprisingly rare feature in other apps.

marcusquinn

@girish Sorry, re-reading, hope my comment didn't come across as ungrateful.

I just saw the list of WIP apps being more hobbyist focused but the best of the bunch business and framework apps on Cloudron I'd hope will also attract more developers and dev-ops brains to the community that should find the convenience and have more experience to help evolve these apps and new ones.

I realise each app is maintenance and experience for working through issues but they are the kind of apps I think you'll get more qualified assistance with that sort of thing.

girish

@marcusquinn No offense taken at all We get asked in support non-stop about all sorts of apps. I think many are even willing to pay for it but under estimate the actual cost of packaging an app.

Let me provide some numbers for clarity. Each app is usually atleast 1 week of full time work for us including packaging, testing and writing automated tests etc (and of course maintaining it forever). So, we have to justify the cost on our side before we start packaging an app. We have to factor in how much we think the app will be used and whether we can support it at all.

To bring some closure to this topic, if an app is required urgently and if you are willing to sponsor the work, please factor in for atleast 40 hours of our time and then feel free to reach out to us at support@cloudron.io. Otherwise, rest assured, we will continue to package new apps primarily based on how many votes it gets in the forum, it just takes time. If you can rally users on the forum to vote on the app you need (maybe interesting info about it, use cases etc), it will already help getting it packaged soon

robi

If you thought I meant a Desktop App, that's easy enough to create with https://webcatalogapp.com for those that like their WebApps separated as I do.

Ooh, thanks for mentioning Webcatalog. I tried using Rambox but it didn't inspire me to use it.

Surprised the Webcatalog guys don't have it in their table matrix.

marcusquinn

@robi Yeah, love it for separating responsibilities and head-spaces, it's not a full browser, so expectations accordingly. This is how I have my Cloudron stuff in WebCalatog for interest:

Screenshot 2020-09-26 at 13.52.57.png

Also, recently changed to using Vivaldi browser as my daily workhorse, and very happy with that.

marcusquinn

@girish That's very fair. I'll see what I can do this end, I've also kept 10 devs busy with a long ticket backlog, so just trying to get some projects closed off to free them up.

Seeing a few new active devs here working on proof-of-concept work is great to see too, so doing what I can on the share-the-joy mentioning to try to get more involved too.

jdaviescoates

Anyone up for packaging 4minitz?

Seems @marcusquinn up for sponsoring it:

https://forum.cloudron.io/post/13804

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Sponsored App Creation