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It's easy to advocate for other people doing more work. :{>}
Heres' an approach a lot of websites have taken to the same "problem:"
Columns and features appear on a monthly schedule, but the "publication date" of the pieces varies within the month. For example, the lead article for the webzine appears on the first day of every month, while a new article from the developer's section would appear on the sixth day of every month, a new tutorial on the 12th, etc.
The magazine as a whole maintains a monthly schedule, yet new content streams out over the course of the month, giving readers a steady stream of "fresh meat."
BTW, publication schedules are *not* artifacts of the print age. They are a function of the available capacity of the staff. You want me to edit and prep a new developer's piece for publication daily, you're going have to start paying me, because I don't have that sort of free time. If *you* do, step up and volunteer; I'm sure Paul will be happy to add more volunteers (and if he's not, I'll cheerfully let you have my chair).
But you nailed the most serious problem in your first post: available content. If we publish everything we have right now, what happens when nothing new comes in over the transom for a while? Several things can cause this, including a lack of writers (the staff isn't writing this magazine, you the community are writing it; we're just here to help the writers look good). For a news site, holding something in inventory is deadly, and whatever you publish, more news will happen tomorrow so the hopper will never be completely empty. But this magazine isn't about news, specifically. There are several other places on joomla.org set up to deliver Joomla news. So keeping the pipeline filed with inventory becomes more of an issue for us.
Dumping everything we can think of in issue 1, as you noted an earlier incarnation tried, is a spectacularly Bad Idea. I realize that will leave many of you wanting more, but I'd rather leave you wanting more, and know that I have more to deliver, than risk not having something for you when you're ready for the next installment. If it turns out there are enough writers out there submitting material to support a more frequent publication schedule, we'll find a way to make it happen; I think I can safely claim to speak for the whole magazine staff when I say we're not here to keep things from you, to hold things back. But keep in mind that for most of the several months while this project has been building there has been one (yes, just 1) article in the "submitted" hopper. When will the deluge start?
That's the big unknown we're dealing with, here. How many people are there in this community who want to write for this magazine? How many pieces will we see? What would happen if we committed to a new piece every single day, and in the first month of operation we received only one piece?
This is essentially a new venture. It's been tried in the past several times, and it has failed. And now, in a world where everyone can self-publish on their own blog, we have to wonder how many of them will send us something, and how many will just keep self-publishing their own material on their own blog? We honestly don't know, so we'd rather ramp this thing up slowly, and make sure everything's holding together, than jump off the cliff and find out later that our wings aren't going to work.
What's the purpose of the magazine? To teach and inform the Joomla community, as well as to reflect the community back to itself. We plan on helping you understand the code, and hopefully each other, better than you ever have before. We want to do that by getting the people who know in front of a wider audience and letting them tell you some or all of what they know. We want to be the conduit by which the community can deliver to itself an image of what it is and how to make itself better. We want to channel advice from great designers and developers to the community at large, raising the bar for everyone. We want to be the rising tide that floats *all* the Joomla boats.
Would getting information out quicker be better? Too many variables to answer that question properly. We need some sort of regulation on the flow to keep it constant, otherwise we risk publishing ten items today, and nothing more for weeks afterwards. Since the material we publish will by and large not be time-sensitive, we'll use that to our advantage and clip the peaks off and use that material to fill in the valleys. Is monthly the ideal schedule? Unknown. We'll have better information later, which we'll use to adjust the schedules. It's a dynamic system; we're only setting the startup parameters. We'll adjust the flow controls up or down later, as (or even if) the flow develops. We'll deal with the question of a faster publication schedule when we see an incoming flow that would sustain one; we're not about to make a promise we can't keep.
As I said earlier, we're not here to hoard submitted articles in a secret room somewhere buried deep within Joomla Mountain. But we need a constant flow of output to keep the venture going. Think of the publication schedule as a dam, regulating the flow of a river -- holding back water at the flood, releasing it during low-water times, keeping the river flowing at a fairly level pace. If I see an inventory of articles waiting to be published that represents more than just the next month or two on the schedule, I'll be right there in front, lobbying for a quicker release schedule. None of us wants to sit on 10-12 completed articles. But right now, I'm sitting on precisely zero. Hopefully, that changes soon.
As for the other quality suggestions: rest assured, from Paul on down we're all going to do the best job we're allowed to do.
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