Project Status Update

Hey, what's up?

Well, glad you asked. There has been a lot happening with the project and its my fault I haven't been keeping everyone up to date. So, here we go:

Website

• Projects have now been grouped by type (core, translations, themes), to make it easier to find what you are looking for. This will lay the groundwork for having module/plugin projects posted on this site as well. This also provides for every project to have its own issue tracker, so each maintainer can follow their own bugs and patches.
• I have also introduced a new project that is for maintaining this website, so if you have an problem with this site or you'd like to see something improved on the site you can now log an issue. You can also see what has already been noted.
• A new feature was added to the posting options which allows you to more effectively post code snippets. If you wrap your snippet with <code> and </code> tags or <?php and ?> the text will be displayed properly. I also hope to add syntax highlighting soon.
• I have also created a post in the forums asking for feedback on the website. Please add your comments there.

Infrastructure & Organization

• In the initial stages of this project, a lot of development and discussions were taking place in an internal installation of ProjectPier. However, this was not very conducive to being open and transparent to the community or encouraging contributions from developers, among other issues. This has now been phased out
• As part of closing down that site, I have setup several mailing lists. I have also encouraged people to post on the forums more instead. The biggest benefit of this is that the archives are publicly available, which makes me feel more open about our activities, and anyone is able to subscribe to the mailing lists which makes it easier for people to contribute.
• We are currently considering ways of integrating the mailing lists with the website and also finding a good way of publishing an archive of the old site's content for reference

Development

• I have put together a fairly significant amount of developer documentation with topics such as coding standards, revision control, patch contribution, and setting up a development environment. There are still holes that I am hoping people can help me fill. I also encourage users and contributors to read through it to get an understanding of how the development process works.
• There are quite a few patches that need review. This means that people need to test them, refine/fix them and help make sure they meet the standards for inclusion in the core project. You can also see the documentation for help on how to test a patch (more notes need to be added). This is what pushes the project forward and accelerates when the next release will be.
• I will also point you to information on how to contribute useful bug reports. The issues in the queue are how the developers know what to concentrate on.
• A critical security issue has been reported, and I have be been working to correct it. I have not publicized the details of the issue in an effort to minimize the exposure of running sites while I have been developing a patch. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to spend as much time on this as I would like. If anyone is interested and able, I would like some help fixing the issue and also will need people that can test the fix once it is complete. You can contact me directly, or preferably post to the development mailing list with your interest. When this is ready, a security update will be released to fix all running installations once they upgrade.
• On a related note, I have also had a company offer to provide security testing of future releases. This will help make ProjectPier a more dependable and secure solution as we move towards a 1.0 release.
• There have also been discussions on the development mailing list regarding how to develop a plugin architecture and possible next steps in the road map. I encourage any potential developers to get involved in this process - we need more help.

Documentation

• One of our main documentation contributors and unofficial documentation coordinator has changed circumstances which doesn't allow him to contribute to the same level any more. So, I'm looking for more people able to contribute to the documentation efforts and ideally another coordinator. A first step for anyone interested in this would be to subscribe to the documentation mailing list and then start contributing to the existing docs.
• I have created a documentation project which can be used to help coordinate issues with the documentation. However, people can also add comments to the documentation pages if they wish to add something to them.
• I have also put together some documentation for developers to read, as mentioned above, which several of you have seen. Please feel free to make comments on it and expand it where necessary.

Upcoming Changes

There are more changes and improvements coming (as it should be). Just a short list of some to expect:

• More Website improvements
• Change of Hosting/Servers
• Security Update Release
• Draft Road Map
• Improved Documentation

Feel free to add any comments or questions below. Hopefully I didn't forget anything, but I will be making an effort to keep people up to date more frequently now.