DJ became XOOPS Core Leader 4 years ago, in summer 2007.
End of 2007 we published this plan for X3:
From:
http://xoops.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=4090Quote:
XOOPS 3.0 Branch
XOOPS 3.0 is our next generation of XOOPS and has been prepared for years, which was named Xoosphere. The first goal of 3.0 is to improve XOOPS with a solid low-level architecture upon which we can build all required components.
The stable public release of XOOPS 3.0, is expected to provide developers and designers a platform with extreme extensibility and high development efficiency, end users with a powerful and customable web management and development system :
- Fully supporting PHP 5.2+ and MySQL 5.0+ natively
- Supporting multiple database drivers
- Supporting multiple authentication drivers, including native xoopsDB, LDAP, OpenID, etc.
- Supporting multi-site feature
- New i18n service with native multi-language support
- Supporting multiple template engines thus customized template engine
- Embedded security protection against XSS and sql injection to free module developers from security concerns
- Enhancement of backend, including usability, automation of management tasks, security audit, etc.
- Boot sequence allowing preload feature
- Kernel is open to third-party developers so that they can add own frameworks or libraries without hacking the core, which also allows developers sharing libraries with others
- Improved ORM will enable crossing-module hook to allow interactions between modules without hacking each other
- RIA (Rich Internet Application : flex or ajax) will be implemented for usability improvement
Creativity and compatibility: the future XOOPS will focus on the solid architecture and cutting edge features, meanwhile, XOOPS 2.3 modules will be fully compatible with XOOPS 3.0 through a legacy system
- A basic module toolkit will be provided for webmasters to create their own modules without programming skill
- Theme becomes inheritable, allowing webmaster creating a new theme dependent on a parent theme shared by other themes, which is convenient for webmasters and powerful for multi-site applications with great potential
- All in all, we will continue to evolve XOOPS into a top-notch CMS for end users, a powerful and extensible platform for developers!
We'll also focus on creating more user-friendly features for the administrator as well as the end-user. The goal is to make XOOPS a first-class experience "out of the box". Once installed, the user should have all the basic modules and features to be fully operational.
Our recent releases focused on stability and security. While we'll improve these as well, our focus will shift to make XOOPS more extensible by creating a module framework that makes development of new modules easier. All of this while ensuring our legendary compatibility with previous modules. We know that switching to another CMS could be very painful, regardless how easy they might make it sound. Only XOOPS is the true growth path for our users and we are committed to keep it that way!
That was going to be delivered in 2008.
In January 2011, three years later, DJ
published this new schedule, and as you can see, we've missed already several deadlines and are way behind:
Quote:
* Alpha 1 in end January (this release), open to community conrtibution
* Alpha 2 in middle February, mainly for developers to review code and write most wanted applications (missed: released on May)
* Beta 1 in early April, for end users to start testing (still missing)
* RC 1 in June, reasonably stable for production development (still missing)
* Final in early December, celebrating XOOPS 10's Anniversary
We all know that sometimes schedules slip, but the problem is that for the several years now we are not able to make any changes or improvements to XOOPS 2.x, because DJ wants it to be frozen. Many of the
XOOPS 2.5 bugs are not being fixed, and it is a constant struggle supporting our X2 users here.
With the current schedule slippages, we probably won't see a stable, bug-free production-ready version of X3 before early 2012.
In the meantime we're losing our users, who are getting sick and tired of waiting for X3, and being forced to deal with bugs in X2 and outdated modules.
So where do we go from here? The original reason for freezing X2 was that X3 would include Legacy code that would enable existing X2 module to be installed and used in X3. That would make sense.
However, last week DJ announced on
his twitter , that Quote:
"Legacy repo will be moved to archives and not maintained anymore, see @julionc proposal on github wiki. Other solutions will be provided."
If this is correct, then this should open X2 development for changes, since there is no compatibility needed anymore.
However, DJ continues to insist on the X2 freeze and new innovation are still being killed or resisted, with the best example now the
ModuleAdmin class developed by Mage. Mage is a very skilled module developer, and I liked his design because it is totally OOP and it was a great way to update our modules to have a consistent GUI and in the process to update the modules to "Blue Move". Our users are asking for updated modules and it was a very good way to accomplish it.
Mage went out of the way in order to not touch the X2 Core (to avoid problems with DJ), and has created a class that is being placed in /Frameworks directory. We've updated several modules as part of our
"Basic Module Pack" that you can test now, but
DJ is trying to kill even that.
My challenge to DJ - if you don't like Mage's code, if you think, you can improve it, then please do so! But DO NOT KILL every contribution the community is providing that is helping to make XOOPS better. This is Open Source, and WE WANT people to contribute, innovate, improve, so we all can learn from each other, and make XOOPS a better system.
I am clearly frustrated with the lack of progress on X3 and the constant delays, and empty promises. But while I would like to see X3 ASAP, I believe that our users deserve fixing bugs and improvements on X2, whatever it would be. They invested their trust in XOOPS, many of them have been here for years, and they deserve our effort to keep them happy. For me our users come first, before anything else.
Mamba
Moderator
Joined:
2004/4/23 13:58
From Ohio, USA
Group:
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