In my mind, anyway, the real value of ActionsForge is having a single point of reference to find Actions, rather than saying "was that Tim’s Action, at freewayactions.com, or Paul’s at actionsworld.com? Or Weaver’s, at the rug shop? (Where is Weaver, anyway?) It’s the network effect in action: one fax machine is worthless, two fax machines are priceless (or Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network rises as the square of the number of its nodes).
I built ActionsForge the first time (for free) at a time when I was building my first framework in PHP, and learning more about object-oriented programming. I was scratching an itch (see above) and teaching myself as I went. I spent hundreds of hours on the project, and built something I am still quite proud of.
The whole point of doing a Kickstarter was to try to afford my own time (which has gotten steadily more expensive) to do this over again in a modern way without cheating myself by spending hours that I couldn’t bill for. I have invested thousands of hours in this community, and I felt like it was only fair that I not be taken for granted if I stepped up again to raise the tide for all boats.
We don’t need the Forge, strictly speaking, at all. We all got along without it until I built it. I had my own “bit bucket” full of Actions, so did anyone else who built them (Tim and Paul have really nice, professional sites for their offerings, Max has an extraordinary amount of tooling around WebYep). It’s just that there isn’t any central place for anyone to look (unless you count asking the list, once again, “where’s that Action that does that thing…”). The same problem may be solved lots of different ways, and if you only look in one or two places (if you know where those places are) you don’t get the whole picture.
That’s the whole value, not in the individual Actions themselves. If everyone drew a line under their own Action usage, I am sure they could do the same sums that you have. But the key is that they wouldn’t all place value on the same set of Actions, even if their list of “core” Actions was as short as yours. And without a central repository, there’s no way they could get that list together except by chance.
Walter
On Mar 6, 2014, at 4:05 AM, Thomas Kimmich wrote:
Some discussions need a bad guy (probably). So let me be the one just for a second.
There are round-about 300 Actions in the forge. For my actual project (using FW to develop a WordPress Theme) I use 5 of them (like in my other projects, too):
- CrowBar
- HTML5
- (not sure at the moment) Advanced Inline Style Mover/ID to class
- Template Helper
- Remove Paragraph (if using annoying internal MarkUp)
which will end up in 2% of available ones.
So if 300 actions will have a total cost of 25k, this is 85$ for each of them. My total pledge should be then 450$ which is possible (am not sure 200 at the moment?).
Let’s go through my list again:
Why do I need
- CrowBar
To prevent me from wrapping p-TAG. Why is this not part of the FW core?
- Remove Paragraph
Above written.
- HTML5
Are we still in the past? Part of the core as well? Yeahh.
So Template Helper and Inline stuff manipulating left, correct?
Both actions are not necessarily part of the core - so external stuff to pay:
170$ correct?
I wonder what your calculation would be if you go through your current project? I know some that have more actions then items in it. You now know why they avoid the forge like the plague?
Summary
Tell me your plans and strategy, start to take the inventory, let me know what you need (graphics, illustrations, images) and do it best off-list to avoid any misconceptions.
If this all is not true, then allow me a last question:
Why is it the lone wolf left alone with it?
Cheers
Thomas
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