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Development Roadmap
So, once we get into open beta, what will our development priorities be?
In general, we're trying to distribute our efforts evenly across three areas: 1/3 to bugfixes, 1/3 to general cleanup tasks (making the backend code better, more modern, and more reliable; making the frontend more usable and useful), and 1/3 new feature development.
Releases will most likely be on a biweekly basis, and we'll release code to a staging/beta environment before releasing it to the userbase in general. At any given time, we'll have three branches running:
* The development branch, into which we will commit that fortnight's changes. Every two weeks, we'll move that into:
* The staging branch, which is a snapshot of the previous two weeks' development efforts, for testing purposes, after which it will become:
* The production branch, which is what will be running on dreamwidth.org.
Our full bug list can be found at Bugzilla. This entry will serve as an overview of what our major milestones will look like.
Open Beta - April 30, 2009
Our list of blocking-open-beta bugs are the things we need to have done by open beta. Major highlights include:
* Complete overhaul of the style system;
* Our payment/shopping cart system;
* Full personal-journal import of all your contents from LJ-based sites;
* Automatic crossposting of new entries to other LJ-based sites.
Site Launch - July/August, 2009
The "site launch" goal is for when we will consider the site reasonably stable. All of the major bugs we've identified in the changes we made during closed beta and open beta will be resolved, and we'll be starting to shift our concentration more to cleanup and feature development.
The site launch milestone on Bugzilla gives a list of the milestone bugs. Major highlights include:
* Userpic keyword renaming
* Reading filters (so you can view subsets of your reading page)
* The ability to "claim" an OpenID account with your Dreamwidth account, so old OpenID comments will display with your Dreamwidth username
* The ability for a Dreamwidth username to "own" a Dreamwidth syndicated feed account (with authentication to verify that they are the owner of that content) and therefore change some of the settings, including commenting policies and the length of time the syndicated feed retains articles;
* Pingback/trackback features;
* The ability to rename your Dreamwidth account for a small fee;
* Miscellaneous usability fixes and other improvements.
Third Quarter, 2009
The Q309 milestone on Bugzilla gives a list of the milestone bugs. We've deliberately gone light on the things planned for Q309, because we still aren't sure how long it will take for us to reach "site launch", and we want to build in some breathing room. Major highlights currently include:
* Draft posts
* Scheduled posts
* Gift certificates/credits system
* Sponsorship of a random active free Dreamwidth user
* A site contributors area, where people who've contributed to the project can get public credit.
* Clear upgrade/migration scripts so that site admins running a LJ-based site can switch over to using Dreamwidth's code if they'd like to.
* And, of course, the ever-ongoing usability fixes and cleanup tasks.
Fourth Quarter, 2009
The Q409 milestone on Bugzilla gives a list of the milestone bugs (although some of what we have planned for Q409 isn't in Bugzilla yet, because we're going to use our feature design process to arrive at the specs for it). Major highlights currently include:
* Better community maintainer tools
* Complete overhaul of the Memories function
* Exporting your journal as a .pdf file
* A new photo hosting/image hosting system
* Redoing the Inbox to make it more usable and flexible.
Our unmilestoned bugs are ones that are either minor enough that we'll take a patch for them whenever someone gets around to them, or ones that are major enough that we've prioritized them for 2010 or beyond. We'll always try to prioritize things at least six months in advance, so people can see what we're planning on putting the majority of our development effort into.
At the end of 2009, we'll also poll our users for your most wanted features, so we can set our priorities for 2010 accordingly. (We did the priorities for 2009 based on listening to comments on the dw-discuss mailing list, as well as from our experience elsewhere.)
In general, we're trying to distribute our efforts evenly across three areas: 1/3 to bugfixes, 1/3 to general cleanup tasks (making the backend code better, more modern, and more reliable; making the frontend more usable and useful), and 1/3 new feature development.
Releases will most likely be on a biweekly basis, and we'll release code to a staging/beta environment before releasing it to the userbase in general. At any given time, we'll have three branches running:
* The development branch, into which we will commit that fortnight's changes. Every two weeks, we'll move that into:
* The staging branch, which is a snapshot of the previous two weeks' development efforts, for testing purposes, after which it will become:
* The production branch, which is what will be running on dreamwidth.org.
Our full bug list can be found at Bugzilla. This entry will serve as an overview of what our major milestones will look like.
Open Beta - April 30, 2009
Our list of blocking-open-beta bugs are the things we need to have done by open beta. Major highlights include:
* Complete overhaul of the style system;
* Our payment/shopping cart system;
* Full personal-journal import of all your contents from LJ-based sites;
* Automatic crossposting of new entries to other LJ-based sites.
Site Launch - July/August, 2009
The "site launch" goal is for when we will consider the site reasonably stable. All of the major bugs we've identified in the changes we made during closed beta and open beta will be resolved, and we'll be starting to shift our concentration more to cleanup and feature development.
The site launch milestone on Bugzilla gives a list of the milestone bugs. Major highlights include:
* Userpic keyword renaming
* Reading filters (so you can view subsets of your reading page)
* The ability to "claim" an OpenID account with your Dreamwidth account, so old OpenID comments will display with your Dreamwidth username
* The ability for a Dreamwidth username to "own" a Dreamwidth syndicated feed account (with authentication to verify that they are the owner of that content) and therefore change some of the settings, including commenting policies and the length of time the syndicated feed retains articles;
* Pingback/trackback features;
* The ability to rename your Dreamwidth account for a small fee;
* Miscellaneous usability fixes and other improvements.
Third Quarter, 2009
The Q309 milestone on Bugzilla gives a list of the milestone bugs. We've deliberately gone light on the things planned for Q309, because we still aren't sure how long it will take for us to reach "site launch", and we want to build in some breathing room. Major highlights currently include:
* Draft posts
* Scheduled posts
* Gift certificates/credits system
* Sponsorship of a random active free Dreamwidth user
* A site contributors area, where people who've contributed to the project can get public credit.
* Clear upgrade/migration scripts so that site admins running a LJ-based site can switch over to using Dreamwidth's code if they'd like to.
* And, of course, the ever-ongoing usability fixes and cleanup tasks.
Fourth Quarter, 2009
The Q409 milestone on Bugzilla gives a list of the milestone bugs (although some of what we have planned for Q409 isn't in Bugzilla yet, because we're going to use our feature design process to arrive at the specs for it). Major highlights currently include:
* Better community maintainer tools
* Complete overhaul of the Memories function
* Exporting your journal as a .pdf file
* A new photo hosting/image hosting system
* Redoing the Inbox to make it more usable and flexible.
Our unmilestoned bugs are ones that are either minor enough that we'll take a patch for them whenever someone gets around to them, or ones that are major enough that we've prioritized them for 2010 or beyond. We'll always try to prioritize things at least six months in advance, so people can see what we're planning on putting the majority of our development effort into.
At the end of 2009, we'll also poll our users for your most wanted features, so we can set our priorities for 2010 accordingly. (We did the priorities for 2009 based on listening to comments on the dw-discuss mailing list, as well as from our experience elsewhere.)
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Other than that, it's great to see the PLANS FOR THE FUTURE! I didn't realize clones were coming so soon!
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And yes, we really want to make it easy for people to migrate to DW code as soon as possible! It doesn't make sense for us to provide migration scripts until the code is reasonably stable, but by the time we hit full launch (as opposed to open-beta launch), things should be reasonably functional.
EDIT: Yeah, the search only worked if you were logged into Bugzilla. I replaced the link with one that should work for everybody.
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BTW, this link: http://tinyurl.com/cfeqe8, unlike the other ones, asks for a login instead of displaying a list.
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I'm sure a bronzed icon of Allen will be on the top. :D
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And on that note, if we ever want to move zilla to the dreamwidth.org subdomain, I'd be happy to give up the bugs comm to you guys.
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Filters
Does this mean that when you import your journal during open beta, the custom friends groups won't get imported? What will then happen to those posts that are made to a custom friends group? Or are reading filters on DW different from the custom friends (access?) groups?
Also, I can't wait for April 30th! I'll definitely buy a paid account.
Re: Filters
(Well, they will once we finish up the bits of the importer having to do with friends. Right now, if a post was locked to a custom friend group, it gets imported as still being locked to that custom access group, and the custom access group is created, it's just not populated with anyone, making the post effectively private. At the moment, you have to manually repopulate it. We still haven't made the last set of decisions about how we're going to handle that -- whether we'll populate them with OpenID accounts for your friends from the service you're importing from, or leave it blank and let you re-create them with those accounts on DW.)
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* The existing memories code won't let you memory a post from another site;
* LJ doesn't provide any sort of machine-readable data feed for memories, so we'd have to screen-scrape to get that information, and screen-scraping leads to getting blocked Very Quickly.
If we can figure out a lightweight way of getting that data out of LJ, what we'll probably do is dump all the links in a categorized list and post that entry to your journal as a private entry tagged "imported memories" or whatever, but it's going to be hard to solve the screenscraping problem.
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Thanks for explaining.
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Also, when using photo/image hosting system, I *beg* of you to use something better than what LJ uses. I'd like something that looks similar to flickr and acts like twitpic for twitter (as far as, how it's related to the site goes). I know I'm getting ahead of you all, but I'm really hoping for mock-ups and a big group vote on which picture site to use.
The thing I hate so much about LJ's image system is it's really not intuitive, the filenames get changed, and well, the layout sucks (which is a large part on why it's not intuitive). I don't feel the software *itself* is intuitive. I'd like to be able to be viewing the photo on my "live" webpage and from there choose to delete the photo.
But to back up to the current parameter a bit: Are you going to "expand" cross posting to use APIs? Like, I plan on using dreamwidth as a back up LJ, so I'd like to have the same "friends" groups over here as on LJ, and when I choose something to be friends only on dreamwidth, it gets posted into the same friends category on LJ. Is this something that's already part of the plan, or do I need to make a post/comment on ?
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sponsorship, photos, and crossposting
on sponsorship:
the plans for sponsoring another random user are in the spec phase, and if you'd like to read more about what we're thinking about it so far, you can look at the specs.
on photo hosting:
thanks for your ideas! at the point when we're ready to tackle photo hosting (it's planned for the 4th quarter of 2009), we will do so with a lot of user input. it will be our first big test of how we want to handle the implementation of large feature additions or changes.
on crossposting:
yes, we are in fact already working on the crossposting capabilities you wish for. :)
hope this helps.
Re: sponsorship, photos, and crossposting
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As an example of a minor bug, using Firefox 2.0.0.4 for the Mac, when creating a new RSS feed, on the "subscribe to this feed?" page, if you choose to customise the colors, there are a couple of odd display issues:
* Typing in a new HTML color code doesn't always update the little color preview box
* The "preview" version of the name of the feed is displayed over the top of the HTML color code typing boxes.
No idea yet if this occurs on other browser/OS combinations; I can test out Safari/Mac, Firefox/WinXP, and MSIE/WinXP, if you need/want, but I want to make sure I'm reporting these sorts of things to a place you find convenient!
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Thanks very much for the link!
Import function
Could the import function have a "from x date"? Then if anything is posted in other importable journals the import would not have to be rerun for the entirety of the other journal, thus saving time for the user and no doubt processing resources for dreamwidth too.
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Just wanted to say this is a really cool idea! If you made sure it was an option in the shop when people go to pay for their own accounts it would be really easy to just tick the box to sponsor a user at the same time. I know I would do it. :D
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Just a thought. You guys have an awful lot on your plate right now!!