Developer News: WF-Projects is joining SmartFactory

Posted by: BenderOn 2005/11/19 15:40:00 10210 reads
We like to inform you that effective immediately WF-Projects is joining into Marcans SmartFactory with most of the WF-Modules.

Against all our affords we have not been able to deliver new releases of some of the most favored modules for quite some time. Although a lot of rewriting to put the modules on a new foundation by John (to take care of some basic issues like querries, permissions that are hard to fix otherwise) has been done there is just not enough time available to finish this in a short timeframe. Additionally with the loss of a part of that work recently it has even gotten the situation worse. (life can be a pain ...)

So John has decided with us that we had to make a decision that would allow the modules to continue quicker. Therefore handing part of the work over to a developer team that will be able to invest more time than he currently can spare for WF-Projects and also holds a quality standard regarding working with Xoops.

Our first choice to ask about this was Marcan which most of you will allready know for his Smart series of modules. And ... as luck would have it he agreed. ;)

Ok i heard you, now give me the details ...

Which modules are you talking about?

- WF-Downloads
- WF-Channel
- WF-Links

Modulenames will be changed accordingly into SmartDownload, SmartChannel and SmartLink with future releases.
Compatibility will be maintained with the original versions, so upgrading will be painless.

Hey, whats up with WF-Sections?

WF-Sections is not part of this agreement. For one reason since this allows John to focus on this module and for the other that there is already SmartSection available from the SmartFactory. Work on the next generation WF-Sections (3.x) will therefore continue but there is no saying about any timeframe at this point.
Alternatively there is a derivate of WF-Sections module spawned from the 2.07 release with several changes and bugfixes by the name magazine from rb.
Some more work might eventually continue on wf-sections 2.07 directly. If you are interested in participating from a coding standpoint please contact me: bender et wf-projects dott com.

Uuuh, didn´t you forget something like WF-Faq, Spaw and Userpoints for example?

There are no plans to continue any of these modules as we have said in the past already for Spaw and Userpoints. WF-Faq has been added to the list now. As a replacement we recommend to make use of SmartFaq.

When will you release the first modules?

When they´re done. =)

What are you planning to do first?

Priority will be given to the outstanding fixes for several modules and bringing their compatability up to Xoops 2.2.x series too. New features will have to stand back behind stability for the first releases.

What about Xoops 2.0.x and 2.2.x series?

Since Xoops 2.2.x is the future and Xoops 2.0.x will receive only bugfixes and security updates in the future this will very much be what we are going to do. Off course we could run two different versions with new features but that would mean a big loss of time and just slow down the further development.

Will the development be closed as before or CVS?

No. Since with most modules we will start over from the last released versions instead of the complete rewrite which was in the works the development will be done with constant use of cvs. Therefore those interested in participating will be able to submit code to the project easily or checkout current progress. The module projects as of now will be hosted on dev.xoops.org site.

What about support?

Forums for the modules developed with Marcans Team will be opened on SmartFactory The forums on the WF-Projects site will remain for the current versions and as an archive for the time being.
For feature requests and bug reports the trackers on dev.xoops.org will be available for every single project.

I have xxxx bug with xxxx WF-Module. When will this be fixed?
Debugging each of the modules will take some time
but in the meantime we would ask you to provide any information that will help us to locate and deal with them.
Please use the trackers for each module on dev.xoops.org for submitting any bugs, so they can be dealt with more efficiently.

Can i help?

Yes of course. We are always looking for further helping hands. If you want to help out just contact us with the contactform on the smartfactory site and tell us in which areas you would like to work with us.

Cheers,
Davidl2, Marcan, Bender