So where to from here?

by e107 in e107

There has been a lot of speculation about the future direction of e107 recently, and its time to put that to rest and move forward.

There has been a lot of speculation about the future direction of e107 recently, and its time to put that to rest and move forward.

The dev team has spent quite a long time (weeks, if not months) discussing all aspects of e107 - the code, the community, the organisation, to try and establish a coherent plan for the future. Some of the results have been around for a while - the establishment of jira as an issue tracking system, some draft coding standards and guidance that we're refining before making public, better code documentation and so on. Overall the objective is to have a much more professionally run project.

We recognise that some things have been far from perfect in the past - sometimes simply due to lack of time; sometimes for other reasons. We're trying to get it right now.

It is also sad to lose McFly's input - hopefully not entirely, since he's still going to be around. As a long-term contributor to e107, its hardly surprising that he needs to concentrate on other things for a while.


Moving on, there are a number of things planned:

1. For 0.7, as well as continuing to maintain the code, we will be adding a few enhancements. These are mostly ones which the dev team already have available, or can release with minimal work, since we don't want to deflect too much effort from getting 0.8 on the way. Various members of the community are also working on enhancements which we will consider.

2. For 0.8, the intention is to move to a release as soon as possible. Part of the delay was due to a realisation that some of the structure was wrong, and is having to be redesigned. This is nearly done, and you should start seeing code changes in SVN soon.
We have a good idea of the final structure we need, and 0.8 is going to be the 'bridge' between old and new in order to maintain a reasonable degree of backward compatibility and provide an upgrade path.

3. On the organisational side, Cameron is going to be the overall project leader (much as jalist was in the early days), backed up by SecretR and myself as the 'old hands'. We already have a capable support team under the leadership of 2dopey, which will continue. The dev team is to be strengthened - as well as existing devs Bugrain and nlStart we have some other community members to be approached. One area where we'd particularly like some input is on the security side. We've also had a tremendous number of offers of talented assistance from all round the world. Not just on the coding side, but also in areas such as marketing and public relations.
So over the next few weeks, we're going to review all these offers, and put together a team to take e107 forward.


More to come - so watch this space.



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