Roadmap for v11

I remember seeing a roadmap for v11 somewhere. I've been watching the work being done on it, and it really looks very capable...from what my amateur programmer eyes can see. I can imagine any v11 roadmap will be different from one published a year or so ago. Is there such a roadmap?

 

Hey,

Good question!

First, where things have been at and where they are at currently:

There was a period where not a lot of progress happened, as things were hanging on me and my life was upside down while I was getting married, immigrating to the US, buying my first house, doing more DIY than my wildest nightmares conceived ;-). Progress is running at a fast pace again now, and the finishing line is in sight.

Features:

There was never an official roadmap, but some progress announcements were made years back, focusing on the frontend changes happening (JavaScript, CSP, new design, SVG, was announced in detail IIRC).

Apart from past announcements, you can get a decent idea what has been done by looking on the tracker:
View Issues - Composr CMS feature tracker
Search for 'Status' as 'Resolved' and 'Severity' as 'Feature', and sort by date.
You can also look at what is tagged on one of the v11 tags (there are a few) to see what is still planned (or already done and was tagged properly - which isn't the case for older issues). Change 'Status' to 'Any' to do that. Actually a number of the issues not yet marked resolved are actually basically done, but hanging on some final details that are a bit of a hurdle to get over.

There are around 15 other small issues I am looking at squeezing in at the moment between other paid work I'm doing. I don't want to properly list or tag them because it's very much discretionary based on how I feel when I look into them. I went over the tracker the other day and identified some things I thought made sense to get done quickly.

Trying out:

The code isn't guaranteed to always work, but anyone at any time can do a git clone of the repository and check out the v11 branch.

Expectations:

I'm currently thinking when/how we should make the release, given current world turmoil. My current thinking is I don't want to release it on my own from home, but rather have a couple of additional people working directly alongside me - particularly because this release is much bigger than just me and I don't want to screw it up by just having it be me at the end.

I have a lot to say about the condition of the world, especially the United States and its recent growing pains. The big issues that we'll have to deal with are still in the far in the future. As we sort out rights vs. viruses and digital currency and gender identity and peak oil and who gets to be a world power, one thing is abundantly clear: social interaction on the internet is becoming more important than ever. The governments are going to wrestle around for a while for physical and political territory, people are going to migrate, and technology is going to march forward in unimaginable ways. The world is like a lava lamp, and the best way to enjoy it is with a good woman, a book on Algol60, a 6-pak of beer .

Aside from the new functionality of v11, I think those svg's and an improved global.css is the home run people are looking for. Composr is already very capable, but v11 will open the door for more theme options, it seems to me.

Last week I got a VPS for stage 2 of my website so I can eventually handle things like audio and video chat, and maybe financial transactions, but in the near future, it will give me a chance to escape some of the very bad styling decisions I've made. A few days ago I actually downloaded only the v11 branch using some nifty terminal commands. Setup crashed right away, which I figured might happen with so much alpha/pre-alpha changes going on with the code, or, perhaps downloading only the v11 branch without the master branch is not the right approach. I thought about taking another shot at it today, though, and if nothing else, just drop the v11 code in place, and then drop the database in from my main site. I'm not sure how much has changed between the v10 and v11 database structure, though. In any event, I'm super stoked about what I'm seeing on git.

(edit)
I think under this forum, a sub-forum called v11 would be something to consider so that beta testers could chime in. Perhaps instructions on how to install a beta v11 after a git pull of the v11 branch.

 

Just downloading the files from a branch on Gitlab is fine if you don't want to use Git directly. Definitely easier. No special instructions needed really.

Any issues with the v11 branch can be reported on the tracker.
Select the "Composr alpha testing" project from the top right.

Make sure you have at least PHP 7.1, as that's the new minimum requirement.

You can't just drop in a v10 database unless you go through the upgrade process. Which will only be tested at the very end of development.