[xoops-anno] The light at the end...

[Skalpa K. <sk...@xo...>]

This announcement from the development team will be published=20
on www.xoops.org in a few hours...
I'm sorry about this, but several problems made us delay it and we=20
wanted it to be available before the release of 2.2.3RC2 which is=20
expected in a few days (however, we will announce this release on
this mailing-list 2 days before it gets public, as some have asked us).

Regards

skalpa.>

-------------------------------------------
Subject: The light at the end...

I must begin this text with apologies. When some among us met last
spring at the time of the FOSDEM, I announced a lot of changes, I was
full of projects. A little later the [i]roadmap[/i] for XOOPS 4 was
published, and then nothing: I completely disappeared during several mont=
hs.
It is true that this absence was as involuntary as unforeseen, and due
to huge problems met in my [i]real life[/i]... nevertheless that does
not change anything for the people who are present here, and while
returning at the end of August I could only note the consequences of
this absence. While disappearing like that, I left this project
devlopment without leader, without global vision, and it is not just a
programmer who missed. Some people tried to mitigate this lack, but
without direction to follow nor real experiment, their task was found
very hard, almost impossible. So, again I make a point of excusing
myself. First to the people who tried to contribute to this project
during this time to have left them, then to all the users who found
themselves without interlocutor, without official position nor clear
response to some their interrogations. Thank you for your assistance,
for your patience or your support: the problems of these derni=E8rs month
will be soon forgotten, it is a promise I make personally.

To explain in detail all that will occur in the next weeks or months
would take too many pages, thus I will try to synthesize as much as
possible today. The principal idea which is at the origin of the
majority of the changes that you will soon see is the same one, but we
will apply it to our program, to the way we work, at every possible
level. To define in a few words what it consists was already made by
another architect called Hans Reiser (the programmer who created
ReiserFS) so I will only quote here his "Reiser's law of information
economics":
[i]The expressive power of an information system is proportional not to t=
he
number of objects that get implemented for it, but instead is
proportional to the number of possible effective interactions between
objects in it[/i].

In normal language what does that mean ? That to communicate is more
important than to act (in latine, communicare that is to say
comm-unicare: how to give the [i]one[/i] to the multiple, to the
[i]with[/i] (to share), or also what allows this [i]with[/i] to give
birth to the [i]one[/i]). That the potential lies in the interfaces, the
relations, in the protocols, and that these are the points we will focus
on at first.

Precisely, here are the main things to be visible soon.

1) About our organization

The first thing I made while returning at the end of August was to try
to give birth to a real development team, whereas XOOPS until today was
always the work of one or some individuals, but who did not form really
what I call a team. Until today, we use a private  mailing-list to work,
but this one will become public in a few weeks. By then, a new site
dedicated to the dev team will be built (in fact, a first version of
this site should be put online very soon): developers' blogs,
documents... all that relates to the development of XOOPS will be
visible, explained, and documented. Each one will be able to see what is
happening, what will happen, and will be able to intervene. The
developers also will take care that the efforts of other teams members
are synchronized with theirs: QA, documentation, local support sites...
as many entities which act in a completely independent way, but which
will have to get closer to each others as much as possible, in order to
make sure they work in a parallelly, helping each others.

2) About XOOPS 2.2

The development and the release of XOOPS 2.2 didn not happen as
expected, but these last months will not have been lost. Whatever
happens, we will ensure during the forthcoming weeks that all that just
occurred will be rich of lessons: to face such probleme is the best
thing one can hope to allow him to exceed oneself. The way new features
were added, the way versions of different types were published and the
lack of communication around those, the lack of documentation which
would have made it possible to more people to understand and to
contribute to the development... many things were learned to avoid
reproducing some mistakes.

XOOPS 2.2.3RC2 will be soon available publicly. This version was
developed from 2.2.2 in order to remove the bugs appeared in the RC1,
which was released in a precipitated way. It will correct a significant
number of bugs, and should remove the majority of the error error
notifces concerning the use of [i]references[/i] when used with PHP 4.4
and PHP 5.1 (however this last modification required several tens of
corrections, [i]references[/i] being used with excessively and
inappropriately in all the core, which explains why we are still testing
it before a public release).

Then, once 2.2.3 is published, new updates of this branch will regularly
be published, after still existing problems are reported to us. Lastly,
in order to answer waitings of certain people having performed an
unfortunate update of their site, a script making it possible to
transform an installation of XOOPS 2.2.x into XOOPS 2.0.13 will be also
available as Release Candidate in a few days.

3) About XOOPS 2.3/2.4

The release of this new version of XOOPS intending to show that what was
announced are not vain promises is also expected very quickly. Those
which have been able to follow my presentation during the FOSDEM or read
the roadmap for XOOPS 4 will recognize some ideas: I explained there how
I saw the future of this system, and it is thus logically that the next
releases will gradually bring us closer to this vision. To simplify,
whereas X4 corresponds so what XOOPS should become, 2.4 will be an
intermediate stage, corresponding more to what XOOPS should be today:
best Web portal management system available... the modifications carried
out during the development of this version will bring many
possibilities, but some big additions like real multi-sites support and
the Content Management layer will have to await a forthcoming stage
(nevertheless XOOPS 2.4 will allow us to prepare the core to receive
these additions). A detailed description of what this version will be
made of should be the object of another article, but here are anyway
some of the mainthings you will start to see shortly...

Development methodology:
- As of the first version (2.3.0), this branch will get instantaneously
the level of stability and compatibility of XOOPS 2.0.13. The
explanation is extremely simple: we will "go back in time" and will use
the 2.0.13 codebase to work (which will be more practical and quick than
to modify or repair some parts of 2.2).
- This small magic trick will allow me to publish very quickly some
improvements I have kept for almost a year, although they were never
made public.
- The functionalities of 2.2 will be added at this codebase,
individually: some will be copied from the 2.2 branch, others corrected
or improved, and the last ones concerning parts entirely remade from
scratch in XOOPS 2.4 (like the blocks management) will be left of , but
we will ensure in this case the equivalent 2.4 layer is compatible with
both the 2.0.x and the 2.2.x one.
- The [i]unstables[/i] releases (2.3.x) will be really usable, although
limited (for example: the 2 or 3 first 2.3.x may require Apache to
work). These limitations will be documented so that most developers,
designers or webmasters can possibly use 2.3.x without makor problems.
- The creation of this branch will be followed by the creation of a new
site dedicated to the development team: you will have the possibility to
follow the evolution of our work and our reflexion, and to comment or
participate (I talk again about this point later, as it is of extreme
importance: the purpose of all the 2.3.x will be to show people what
tomorrow will be, so they can give us feedback as soon as possible,
before all is finished).

A few objectives:
- Low-level refactoring
A lot of work will be done to refactor the kernel and its boot sequence.
Here we'll have several objectives. The first will be to clean up this
part of the core, and obtain something highly structured to allow
further, distributed development of the classes it will contain. It will
allow us to add a few functionalities before 2.4.0 is reached (enhanced
session and auth, the possibility to use several boot files, real https
awareness...). Last, this necessary step will allow us to bring some
highly requested features to the core in a next (2.5./2.6) version, like
the possibility to manage several XOOPS sites from a single install, or
real multi-language functionnalities.

- The output layer
The new output layer will be one of the first additions to be released.
Inspired from some of the concepts of OO programming (like inheritance),
it will allow themes to have parents so a webmaster can make a common
theme for his site, then add [i]children[/i] themes changing only a few
templates or files. This new layer will remove the confusing separation
between themes and templates sets, allow any resource to be customized
(templates, css, but also images), and is expected to be quite faster
than the actual buggy one.

- Web standards
This part will also be extremely important: the respect of web standards
is what will allow XOOPS to morph from a server platform (like most
other CMS), to a real Web platform.
All the XOOPS pages will strictly respect the HTTP standards (use
response codes, redirections, but also send appropriate headers).
On another side, several default themes will be provided: at least one
to ensure XOOPS can work with old browsers, but more importantly one
strictly standards-based XHTML theme for real browsers like Safari,
Mozilla or Opera: and stricly means strictly here... if it was bad to
misuse html tables some years ago, it's not better to misuse CSS or put
<div><div>...</div></div> everywhere today, or not take care of the
difference between a class or an id.
The last point concerning standards and the Web is one most people will
understand more easily: the Web is built on the concept of URIs... This
means that internally, the new core will now manipulate canonical URIs,
not script locations (what people call shortURLs).

- The portal management application
All the portal management layer will be externalized and redone from
scratch and this new module will bring many new features. First the site
navigation will become completely independent from the installed
applications. People will be able to define section or pages like
folders, and associate content URIs or blocks layouts to these sections
(so the same page can be displayed at several places with different
blocks). The second big change will come from what this module considers
a "block" or "page". XOOPS 2.4 will be a universal wrapper, and will
allow you to display anything available on the Web (content from XOOPS
modules, other applications, or in fact ANY webpage).

That will be all for today...

But before going back to work, I'd like to thank everybody helping us:
first, thanks to the readers who were patient enough to read this long=20
article, thanks to people contributing to this project, thanks to our
so positively surprising community members, thanks to the trolls who
haunt our forums and make us laugh, and even thanks to all the goblins wh=
o
spend their time spitting on the efforts of the people involved in XOOPS,
whithout trying to give anything constructive: whether on purpose or not,
you all help us find the energy and strength that will make all of us
succeed: Thank you all, sincerely...

skalpa.>