Package Team update | November 2019

Written by Jesper Mayntzhusen

The Umbraco Package team has recently been established, in an effort to improve the Umbraco package experience with heavy involvement from the community and users of Umbraco. After forming a team all of the members were invited to Umbraco HQ to align our purpose and to plan what we want to do and in what order. We had 2 great days getting a lot of things done! I will take you through it all:

Make sure to read our previous blog post if you would like to catch up on how the Package Team was initially created.

Package team visit at Umbraco HQ

It was great for us to meet up in person, up until now we have only had a couple of video calls, so this was our first opportunity to meet and talk as a team in one location.

Unlike the other teams (Documentation Curators and Core Collaborators - previously known as the PR Team) we haven’t been together for a long time, and, before last week, we haven’t figured out exactly what we want to do. That changed when we finally met! 👋

Most of the two days at Umbraco HQ went with discussing what we want to do, how we want to do it and in what order. One of the products of the visit was us writing down what the Package team mission is, along with our goals, focus areas, team activities and much more. You can find a list of all of these things on Our.

One thing that we are really excited to introduce from the visit is our Umbraco Packages repository. This repository contains several different things, and we have plans to add more in the future.

How we'll work with GitHub project boards

Our first use of the repository is planning and showing updates of our work. We will do so by using the GitHub project boards for all of our work and planning. GitHub project boards are simple boards that you can pull issues into, and we will do so whenever we work on something. The first project board I want to draw attention to is our Roadmap, which looks like this:

We have decided to use the same structure as the Umbraco roadmap, a “Now, Next, Later” format. Each item can be a simple note, and in case it is larger, it can be a separate project board as can be seen on the picture above with the “Documentation for packages” project. We encourage you to go check it out, and keep an eye on it for updates.

We also have other project boards for larger projects we want to work on, and will add more in the future as we move to other tasks.

Package issues and how we'll structure them

One of the main things the Umbraco.Packages repository will be used for is keeping track of issues. These issues are what we base our roadmap and projects on. However, when talking to package developers and users, we have discovered that there may be a need for other things as well. So for now we will have 3 different types of issues:

Package ecosystem feature requests
These will mostly be what the package teams work will be based around. This is supposed to be feature requests for anything to do with the Umbraco Backoffice, Umbraco Core, the Our package section or package documentation / tooling.
Package ideas
This is where you can share ideas for packages, both if you are looking for feedback on your package, or if you are looking for functionality that doesn’t exist in a package and you would like to share the idea with package developers in the hope that someone creates a package for it.
Requests for collaborators
If you have a package you would like help with, or maybe you don’t have any time to maintain your package and want to hand it over to someone else.

Each of these issue types have their own issue templates, so if you have anything you would like to add feel free to stop by our issue tracker.

Get in touch!

We hope that you will get involved, and look forward to hearing your feedback regarding the structure. You are welcome to reach out to any of the team members on Twitter:

Or write us at packages@umbraco.com 💌