Hi everyone,
We've been quiet for some time now, so about time we told you what's happening with Ninjaboard!
1. A new release cycle.
Inspired by how apps like Google Chrome is developed, we've done a dramatic shift in how we develop Ninjaboard.
The way we used to do it, is that we worked on a single version for everything.
The problem were that if a security vulnerability, or a critical bug surfaced that required immidiate action then an unstable trunk would delay the release.
Now we have two separate versions that we develop on. One production version (right now that's 1.0.x), and the other the development version (today that's 1.1).
The production version is the stable one, and on that branch we only do bugfixes, optimizations and other minor things.
The development version is for everything else. We develop new features here and even though it's called "development" we target each iteration as a stable one.
Why does each build need to be as stable as possible? Every 6th week the development version will replace the production version on our svn, and we spend 1 week further stabelizing it before we do a public release.
We also instantly continue working on the next version.
This allows us to release new versions whenever we need to, whenever we fix our users bugs. Maintenance releases don't have to wait for new features to finalize. New features don't have to wait for bugfixes either.
So with that in mind, the new cycle kicks in February 7th, meaning we'll see a public release on the 14th.
2. JoomlaWorks sponsors development!
Thanks to JoomlaWorks, 1.1 will have some really cool new features:
- SMF 1.1 converter, the first ever Ninjaboard converter that can handle stand-alone (not bridged with Joomla in any way) forums.
- Private Messages, since SMF have this feature the converter couldn't be successful without also migrating that data.
- UTF8 and ASCII dual support for slugs, the code used to accomplish this in k2 is donated to us by JoomlaWorks.
This is just the tip of the iceberg on what's coming in 1.1, so the 1.1 release announcement will reveal a couple of nice surprises
3. Joomla! 1.6 support moved to 1.2
We simply don't have enough time to make our ACL work with the changes done in 1.6 in time for 1.1's release, so it's moved to the 1.2 milestone.