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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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