Hi guys.
Things are moving those days for Pencil2D 
I think we should take the opportunity to write a new newsletter. Last one was written on July 4, 2013
I think I read that a new release of Pencil would be available soon.
Maybe once that is done and that I have refreshed the website, we could post something. Tell the world things are moving and maybe have a chance to get more developers on the project.
What do you think about it and what are your ideas ? Who could help ?
Gordie @admin Since I’m still busy this weekend I’ll write down most of what I had thought initially to do when I had free time this december. Part of what I wanted to do was:
To stablish a roadmap mixing: Feature Requests, Current Features, Critical (needed) Features and stuff like that.
Propose a collaborative project between active pencil members to create 2 or 3, 15 second spots for pencil to promote the software capabilities. This would be tied to the “stable” (not-as-buggy-as-before) release version.
Propose a redesign of Pencil2D portal with an even more friendly design to organize things visually. This will have to be discussed properly as some others have expressed similar ideas in the forums.
Create a Pencil2D Intro video showcasing the features of pencil. I was willing to do that trying to use only open-source software. This was meant to be used as our introduction to other open-source projects and to the general public.
An artist Gallery, to showcase curated works that have been done with or have been aided by pencil2D so far. This is because any kind of work gets lost in the forums and it’s a pain to look again for it.
Reformat the forum structure and rename the subforums with more standard stuff, I still soemtimes have to read the descriptions to know where to post, this shouldn’t happen. For example separate bug reports forum and a “general help” etc.
Create a FAQ page with most repeated inquiries to date (I’m already working on this)
Propose to other open-source projects with similar interests to collaborate in a monthly / bimonthly online development JAM, so the devs can exchange tips & tricks about development for graphics & animation software like Krita, Blender, Synfig, etc. I already created a “pencil2danimation” google account to host hangouts for this purpose. I think actually trying to be present with each other even dspite hour zone differences would tighten up the relationships between the community and the devs.
Tutorials. Lots of tutorials. We need to show the most common pitfalls and uses of pencil since people always are asking the same. Since I’ve done tutorials in the past for other software I was going to start with at least 2 introductory tutorials for pencil but I honestly need it to work for that.
A Qt C++ Beginner’s guide to coding for Pencil2D. I was going to ask Matt @chchwy and François @feeef about this, to help make a joint document in order to allow new people to help code Pencil2D, if they don’t know about Qt, where could they learn about it? so links to actually useful resources plus how to code, compile and all that. This might take a while to finish but it will prove useful. Other communities have similar guides, so it’s only normal.
Make regular art & animation contests so regular users feel compelled to use Pencil2D to create anything. Sometimes what happens most is that people open the program, draw a few things, and it crashes or something doesn’t work so they abandon the software. I’ve been scouring tumblr Pencil2D artworks and caught a wind of this behaviour. So focused art contests might help to organically promote the software, besides there are still plenty of loyal users to the old Pencil version.
More to come…
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3) Propose a redesign of Pencil2D portal with an even more friendly design to organize things visually. This will have to be discussed properly as some others have expressed similar ideas in the forums.
maybe this theme ?
@admin That one actually looks really nice! Feels like it’s easier to keep track of the forum updates and the dev stuff which are the most active parts of the community.
@oinkystudio had suggested this website http://www.zeptolab.com/ earlier to have as inspiration, and your recommentadion is strikingly similar!
About the themes, I really feel that Pencil2D’s main site needs to change a bit, particularly the way the lately news and posts are handle. So I am incline to choose one similar to the one pointed by @admin.
The other one by @oinkystudio is a very nice one, I really like the interactivity of the bottoms and images, but at the end I think it is a bit distracting since everything tried to catch my attention.