I'm a bit concerned about posting this message at this early stage, but I think it needs to be said since clearly my stirring in the last few weeks has concerned a few people.
The main thing to say is that attention to outside contributions is picking up again. David R has been reviewing, feedbacking and committing on Zilla over the last few days, and I've seen a couple of old faces reappear submitting bugs, suggestions and patches. This is good stuff. Also, I'm starting to test and review Zilla patches myself and post improvement suggestions or thumbs-up, but I've been a bit slow getting into that since I'm still working on streamlining the process so that I can apply patches from Zilla to a local clean copy of the source in one motion and thus quickly produce alternative patches without incorporating everything else I'm working on at the time.
I hope by next month either I'll be used to this review/test malarky and be able to do it quickly and help everyone get good patches committed or I'll be made redundant by the real staff devoting time to it. Either way, now is a good time to come back to or start contributing as without submitted patches it's hard to get the hang of efficiently dealing with patches!
The office staff have also started posting the weekly task list again so we can tell what they're working on and thus know what the current focuses are and also have indication of major changes like the push to using real $u objects rather than just hashrefs to avoid submitting patches which are stale before they're even submitted.
Let's give this another go and see if we can make it work this time. If you don't know where to start, you might like to check out the less-complex bug reports on Zilla, particularly some of the non-controversial enhancement bugs that have been sitting stale for years. For now “big” patches which touch all sorts of different things are best avoided since they are hard to review properly and so let's wait until the cogs are moving properly again before we start on that stuff.
Feel free to reply if you have any issue/question/qualm about this post. ;)