dotProject

We see infrequent offers of help from members of the user community, mostly asking how they can help, offering to develop dotProject.

There are three major ways in which users of dotProject can help dotProject.

If you're not very technical / don't program / don't know how to create a patch or a code diff - then you can still help out tremendously by running structured / regular testing on dotProject and reporting the bugs you find. When you do this, please provide us with details of the test case that you used to generate the bug. This means that the programmers path to resolution is sped up, and we can grab that test case and add it to the structured testing plans we're trying to write at the moment.

If you are technical, then submitting proposed fixes (via patches or diffs) on the various outstanding Mantis bug reports for the current release will help immensely. We realise that bug fixing isn't the so called "glamorous" end of the development world, but it's the most time-consuming, it's of enormous benefit to the rest of the user community and it's the bit that holds us up from working on the new versions time and time again. And you never know, show some commitment to the project and the Project may invite you to join the dev team (and hence get into the pointy end of the work).

If you don't feel like doing either, then why not submit some test cases so that I can include them in the test plans - (we're using Testlink to write our test plans now and it's great but test plan writing .. and executing for that matter is time consuming). Yes - we will be moving towards automated testing as well - but at this stage we've only ever had test plans written up locally - nothing centralised / formalised.

If you're interested in offering us something like this - some real practical help in the grotty, less seen, less glamorous but immense side of the project, then by all means drop me a line if you want more details (karen at dotproject dot net) or just roll up your sleeves and dive in.

We're currently running testing on the 2.x CVS tree of dotProject looking towards a 2.1.2 release.

This release will include some badly needed fixes to the Files / Folder handling which unfortunately did not incorporate permissions handling properly, as well as some general performance improvements. We'll outline everything that's incorporated in the release notes as per usual - but you can follow issues being addressed via the Documentation Site > General Information > Status page

At this stage we don't have a release date for 2.1.2 - it will all depend on the progress of testing, but if you have any bugs that you wish to report (and you're sure haven't already been reported) please get them in asap so that we can look at them during this process.

It would appear that there is the assumption that the move to Zend is going to lose code that has already been developed in the head branch. This, unfortunately, is even coming from former dP developers who should know better. Let me make this absolutely clear. The Zend revamp is to use the Zend base libraries, MVC controller and other framework components to provide a solid architectural base for the code. The existing business logic will be retained. We are not throwing out the baby with the bath water. A lot of code will go, but even more will remain. To do otherwise would be suicidal.

So to all of those that developed fixes and functionality in the head branch and are wondering if their work was in vain, rest assured that unless it was crap code, it will be in the 3 release.

The current release of dotProject is v2.1.1

We are working on a few odds and ends of bug fixes, some performance improvements and a greatly needed overhaul of some of the code in the Files Module (including sorting out permissions inconsistencies), and this will be released as 2.1.2 - we are hoping before Christmas, but this will depend greatly on the results of formal testing runs.

If you'd like to contribute to that effort please download the development snapshot for the 2.x tree from: http://dotproject.sourceforge.net/dotproject-stable_2.tar.bz2

and run your own testing / report any issues encountered at http://bugs.dotproject.net

In case you missed the announcement we decided that dotProject series 3 needed to have some radical surgery. So we took a look at what was around and decided that a decent framework was in order. So in steps Zend Framework, and a few fevered nights of coding, and hey-presto, we have a login page and a module working. I know it doesn't sound much, but to those in the know that is a huge achievement and means basically that the idea is going to work and that progress is going to be a lot less painful than Hanrahan would have predicted. In fact I'm really chuffed at the work so far. The result is going to be a lot more solid, and a lot slicker and certainly a lot easier to maintain than the current code.

This isn't just a facelift with a few rounded corners to kid you into believing that the internals have changed. This is a rethink of how the internals work and then putting the tried and true code already developed onto a solid core, and giving us the ability to become more flexible and easier for module developers to work with.

I can't guarantee a time for the new release, but I can guarantee that it will be a far better product in every conceivable way than our current product. Let's face it, given how good we currently are, this is going to be a ripper.

You can subscribe to the commits list to keep an eye on progress, or catch up with some of the devs on the #dotproject IRC channel over at irc.freenode.net.