I'm currently not funded but have been working most recently on ...
1. Performance improvements to two key packages, forums and bug-tracker. Forums performance is important to all .LRN installations. bug-tracker performance is only important to those doing development but is crucial to that community, who has found the current implementation to be too inefficient to be usable with even a moderate (> 1000 entry) bug database.
The forums work has been released and can be seen on OpenACS.org. The initial bug-tracker work's been committed and will be tested in the next few days on the openacs dev site and then rolled out to OpenACS.org.
Underlying this work has been a fundamental improvement in the performance of the template list builder, our tool-of-choice for presenting lists of information (threads of a forum, bugs in a project, members of .LRN etc). The API for applications is unchanged, however using the list builder in pagination mode will now result in very tangible improvements in performance even if you choose not to cache results.
I'm also fixing a couple of very minor bugs in the pagination UI that have led that UI to be a bit confusing to at least some of our OCT members, and undoubtably users at large.
2. Portals rewrite. I'm going to be incorporating the improvements (localization among other things) to the new portals package made for the CTK project. I'd gotten about 2/3 of the way through the very complex upgrade scripts needed to migrate sites to the rewritten package before the holidays, then set that work aside because we decided that the items in #1 above were of a crisis nature for OpenACS 5.1. Currently some folks have been using the new portals package for openacs.org-based work, and integration with .LRN is mostly complete. The upgrade process is the stickler, it's a complex problem.
3. Rapid development, particularly of CR packages. I want to spend a month or so working on building tools to make much easier the rapid development of simple packages, including those that make use of the CR. This will build on the excellent Tcl API work done by Daveb, Jun and others.
I don't have a schedule for either #2 or #3 other than a rather loose "by spring" self-imposed deadline.
