Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS bi-weekly Newsletter, 2003-11-06
First off a quick comment from Jade Rubick, who mentions that Project Manager is on hold for the next two months, while he upgrades the Intranet at his workplace.
Joel Aufrecht
We are having a good thread about community priorities, and I wanted to highlight a few that people have asked for that are finished or in progress:
AOLServer 4.0
OpenACS 5.0 has been tested against AOLserver 4 betas and works. We are still waiting for AOLserver 4 to ship before we make it part of our official platform.
Smarter logging
We've done some small fixes and started discussion about a bigger system.
Test 5.0 (we've found too many trivial bugs lately)
Many people at MIT have joined the testing effort; we have more automated testing, and we are using the test servers to ensure that the daily build works. We still get many reports about HEAD being broken - we need people to verify against the test server and then write up bugs so that we know if the problem is installation docs, code that only works in the test server environment, or other.
OACSH -- OpenACS Shell
Checked in to acs-developer-support.
Lars Pind
Releasing 5.0
We were hoping to be able to release 5.0 by November 1st, but in the end, it wasn't possible. There has turned out to be a lot more bugs than we'd thought, which shouldn't have had been a surprise to us, since we've had very little test coverage until recently. As an example, I spent about a full week just setting up some .LRN communities and classes, fixing all the bugs I ran into. There were quite a lot of them. I'm sure I could've spent a few more weeks doing just that.
Despite the slow progress, we have put out two alpha releases.
Thankfully, about a week ago, MIT stepped in to help the efforts. And we're hoping that putting out a beta release tomorrow will help get more people to test and fix problems, so we can get a solid release out soon.
Forums UI
We've done some improvements for the threaded forums UI for Heidelberg University. Not perfect, but definitely a step in the right direction.
Metadata-based form generation
I've started looking into automatic form generation from metadata using form builder and as many elements on the CR and CMS as I can figure out how to use. I've started a few threads about it, but with limited reponse. Seems like nobody's really doing anything with this at this point. I think it's a key piece to get settled for the next release of OpenACS, though. I'd like to see users be able to dynamically add new elements to a bug in bug-tracker, for example. Or to dynamically change the bug-tracker form layout.
In that same vein, we're trying to help the CMS umbrella project staighten out some of the API, templating, and form building issues, the infrastructural pieces of a good CMS solution.
Workflow
We've also picked up workflow again, adding API, UI, and new features. We'll be building API and UI for defining workflows, plus probably a task list for seeing your open tasks. We've also recently built a delegation feature that lets you delegate your workflow tasks to someone else while you're on vacation, which we'll hopefully get a chance to roll into OpenACS. This will all be 5.1.
State Of The Codebase
Daily files commited/touched in HEAD by all committers:
2003-10-23 :: 85
2003-10-24 :: 47
2003-10-25 :: 51
2003-10-26 :: 3
2003-10-27 :: 0
2003-10-28 :: 134
2003-10-29 :: 220
2003-10-30 :: 55
2003-10-31 :: 23
2003-11-01 :: 255
2003-11-02 :: 84
2003-11-03 :: 15
2003-11-04 :: 299
2003-11-05 :: 31
Bugs
Submitted: 1089 (up 73).
Open: 266 (up 31).
Closed+resolved: 824 (up 43).
Patches
Submitted: 342.
Open: 43 (down 7).
Frank.
