An update on future Composr development

I originally posted this for a news announcement, but decided it was a bit personally-orientated for our main home page, so I'm reposting here as I still want to give a straight-forward honest explanation of why Composr v11 is so late.

Hello all,

I am writing this update personally, as the lead developer for Composr CMS and as the CEO of ocProducts Ltd.

It's very apparent that Composr v11 is very delayed.  People may be thinking the project is dead or dying, and I want to assure people that this is not the case. I would not let this happen.

There are many reasons for the v11 delay. Here is a summary:

1. My life has been in general disarray, due to moving his life from the UK and US, and going through 10 years of life progress in about 3 years of clock time. This has been much more disruptive and complex than I had imagined. Immigration is complex. Setting up a new life is complex (everything from bank accounts, to cellphones, to official records, to integrating with new friend groups and a new family and new traditions). Marriage is complex. Buying a house is complex, and so is filling it up with furniture etc. Setting up the house to be a magical automated house, to free up future time, is complex. Not to mention having a baby on the way. I've been working extremely hard to get very well organised so that this I have more free time in the future than I've had during this transition. Other projects drop out of existence when the lead developer's life changes, and I'm committed to not letting that happen to Composr.
2. I was not actually supposed to be the lead developer specifically for the v11 release. A new developer was hired, and for a variety of very painful reasons this did not go to plan. Out of respect I will not go into detail on this. I will say though that even though the developer didn't lead the release to completion, they did inject a fresh perspective into the project that has been transformative.
3. Composr v11 is a very ambitious release.
4. I've had some health problems, which are now resolved. I was getting chronically dehydrated causing regular flu-like symptoms, and it took me years (!) to track down the cause. For some reason I never really get thirsty, I just end up sick when I forget to drink. Ironically I gave up energy drinks (I'm a caffeine-fiend), and because I've not been drinking those and my life has had me away from the desk so much, this issue has only become apparent in my new life. So me quitting caffeine indirectly made me sick.
5. Composr CMS is sponsored by ocProducts, allowing a high level of consistency in the product up to this point. ocProducts is a small private company fully funded by client work, not by outside investors, and this is very important to ensure that Composr isn't turned into a watered-down mass-market freemium product. The tradeoff though is that there are no staff employed only to work on Composr, and functionality is developed for sponsoring clients and then integrated into core - or developed between client projects. There has been a lot of client work going on in the last couple of years, and it has taken away time from direct development. The tradeoff has been worth it though: I won't name names, but if you look at some popular Open Source CMSs critically you'll see how venture capital has really caused their ethos to shift.
6. The remaining issues to get v11 finished require big blocks of time to complete, so cannot be fitted in between tasks. In terms of clock time it isn't actually more than a few weeks left, but it's been very hard to find week-long blocks of time for the above reasons.
7. COVID has naturally been very disruptive, and our priorities have all shifted during the pandemic to aid the situation and best achieve what is open to us during our altered lives. In my case, my wife and I completely repainted our house ourselves, and went for a 45 minute nature walk each day to keep ourselves fit.
8. It is clear that the world of web development/programming has changed considerably in recent years. We've gone from web developers being relatively wild hired guns, to some of the best paid upper middle-class people in the world. It just is not easy to directly hire top-tier web developers to work on a free product (it never was, but it's a lot harder now), so more has rested on the shoulders of fewer people. This is one reason why after v11 is released our development model will be shifting considerably, to adapt to the new reality.
9. I've been helping my wife launch her art business. Lots of tech support and IT setup so she can do effective live streaming.

While we haven't had many news announcements recently, or much forum activity, people who look at the tracker or Git commits will see there has been a lot of activity there.

Some very good news is that we are actually a long way, and getting closer, to Composr v12 being done. A lot of the functionality we were planning for v12 is either already developed for v11, or is planned to be developed for clients soon. I've had Patrick Schmalstig working physically alongside me for weeks knocking out some of this stuff. The expectation therefore is that when v11 is finally done it will be an epic release – it will essentially 3 releases in one, the cancelled v10.1 work that was rolled into v11, the v11 work, and the v12 work moved forward.

I do apologise for how late Composr v11 is, and how we've updated over the years and it still has not appeared. It's definitely not what was planned and is far from ideal. From a practical point of view, I would always encourage people not to depend on the core product's release cycle for any functionality you need. Skilled developers can always pluck code out from the v11 branch and backport it to v10, or do custom development (which may then be rolled into a future version, as per our development model).

I imagine the majority of people awaiting v11 are happy to wait as long as the process takes. The progress that has made so far is fantastic considering the small team working on it. Rushing a release doesn't seem like the best idea and v11 sounds worth the wait, so as much as we are looking forward to it please don't put too much pressure on yourselves to deliver it. It will be done when it's done

My first ocPortal/Composr installation was the shiny new version 3. Aside from peaking under the hood of a few other CMS's over the years, I've always stuck with OCP. Why? In a word: excellence. Excellence in product and excellence in support of that product.

If Chris & Co. ask me to wait for something new, I'm always more than happy to oblige as I know excellence cannot be rushed nor can life's bumps and twists always be anticipated let alone ignored.

I'm happy to hear your health has returned Chris and your footing in your new life becoming much more solid!

As always, if there is anything I can do to help, please do not hesitate to let me know!

Be well, SD

Will there be a Beta or some kind of release which doesn't involve grabbing the whole repository before the final release? I imagine this would be useful for testing and I think the last time I managed to get an instance of v11 running was March 2020

Adam said

Will there be a Beta or some kind of release which doesn't involve grabbing the whole repository before the final release? I imagine this would be useful for testing and I think the last time I managed to get an instance of v11 running was March 2020

From “Post #8,378”, 13th December 2021, 1:37 pm

Yeah there will be   .