Does such a thing exist?
A development road map or a feature list of items which will be part of the development?

Trying to get a better understand of where the project stands now, what he future looks like, and how we can assist in getting it there.

Geeklog is well known for not having any documents about future work. And that's as much as I'll say about that.

This is a little off topic, but over at gl Labs, we've tried to keep current roadmaps of all the plugins (Media Gallery, Chameleon, CAPTCHA, Caching Template Library, etc.) that have found a home there.

It's not much, but it's a starting point for discussion. ...Perhaps one day the Geeklog core developers might find something like it beneficial. :wink:

Thx!

Eric

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Synergy - Stability - Style --- Visit us at glfusion.org

How can *any* development effort take place without there being some documentation in place about what is being developed?
Use cases, requirements, user input, feedback, new feature requirements / bug fixes / etc. at some level. Be them pretty or not.

Is a basic list of features too much to ask for?

In my experience, yes, that is too much to ask for. I have asked in the past.

Here it is from the mailing list. This contributor was a core dev but has since moved on. Still, no other core devs disagreed with this assessment. The first parts of the message are about a feature idea that did not happen. Skip them and read the last quoted section (which I wrote) and the response after it: post in the mailing list

Thanks for the reference on that. Interesting read. Sadly, (IMO) it shows the maturity level of the product (rather project) and the development as a whole, and or the lack thereof.

If a development effort is happening on a project, however nobody can tell you what the development effort consists of, or what direction the effort is headed, then what should the expectations be of the users and 'audience'? A lot lower than they currently are.

Coming from 10 years of software development history, specifically product management, and customized product solutions, this is rather disappointing. Makes me go back and really consider making the move to Joomla as I have been considering for the past few months. Joomla at least tells me what's on the road map, or even at a bullet point level, what a sketched out feature list looks like.

I find more useful information there than I do anywhere else.

Thx for the kind words.

Eric

---

Synergy - Stability - Style --- Visit us at glfusion.org

Well, there is some information available if you follow the CVS checkins. Here's a quick bullet list of new features in CVS waiting for to be finished and released.

* New GUI install and configuration (No more editing lib-common.php or dozens of little config.php files)
* Webservices API
* OpenID support (Client only)
* Stories can be posted in wikitext and other restructuring of the story code
* Comments can be closed.
* Polls got a major overhaul

There's also the history file but it mixes bug fixes and feature updates in a rolling mishmash:

Geeklog History/Changes:

??? ??, 2008 (1.5.0)
------------
- COM_hit() is now called from COM_siteFooter() instead of doing the UPDATE SQL
directly (reported by Joe Mucchiello) [Dirk]
- New function SEC_encryptPassword() to be used when we have to encrypt a
password. This is only a wrapper for md5() for now but should it make easier
for us to use some other method in the future [Dirk]
- Incorporated patches by Joe Mucchiello for places in the code where the
template library was used incorrectly.
- Added batch admin feature to send out account reminders [Blaine]
- Hide "Create Account" link in the story submission form when new account
registration has been disabled (reported by Markus Wollschläger) [Dirk]
- Updated COM_startBlock to set a unique {blockid} template variable [Blaine]
- Fixed checking of "Show Admin lists" in Group Admin when going to 2nd page of
results [Oliver]
- Created new function for Admin-Menu display and removed that functionality
from ADMIN_list-functions. [Oliver]
- Fixed missing N/A display when no plugin version number was available
(reported by Machinari) [Dirk]
- Avoid division by zero error when $_CONF['limitnews'] == 0
(reported by Samuel M. Stone) [Dirk]
- Bugfix: Atom always assumes 0.3 and doesn't handle article dates. (Reported by
mystral kk on the forums). [Mike]
- Added OpenID support, provided by Choplair
- Pass site_name into story templates so advanced linking to items like digg.com
can be templated cross-site. [Mike]
- Revamped DB Backups option. It now lists all backups (all .sql files), and
lets you download and delete backups from there [Dirk]
- Fixed checking for errors when sending Pingbacks or Pings [Mike, Dirk]
- When receiving a Pingback, optionally create an excerpt from the text of the
site that sent the Pingback [Dirk]
- Portal blocks now use the HTTP Last-Modified and ETag headers to only request
feeds when they have changed [Dirk]
- The {read_more_class} variable now contains class="story-read-more-link" (if
defined) for consistency with the class name used in {readmore_link} [Dirk]
- Changed the Security Check to only check if any Root users have their password
as "password" [Dirk]
- Made admin/sectest.php recognize 403 status codes (reported by THX100) [Dirk]
- All plugin API's, where not doing very, very plugin specific activities now
call a matching CUSTOM_ function. [Mike]
- Integrated support for passing parameters to phpblock functions (Patch #643 by
Joe Mucchiello) [Mike]
- Fixed numerous HTML errors in admin pages [Oliver]
- Added a missing blank between the day's name and the date in the Older Stories
block (reported by Jeruvy's girlfriend, via IRC) [Dirk]
- fixed bug [#648] sending new password email returns "Ok" message although
it fails when SMTP Server cannot be reached [Oliver]
- Need to include parameters in the URL when sending Pingbacks, e.g. to
Serendipity [Dirk]
- When sending Pingbacks, also search for <link rel="pingback"> if the linked
site does not send an X-Pingback header [Dirk]
- When sending Pingbacks for a story that had identical link texts for different
URLs, only the last of those links was pinged [Dirk]
- Implemented new Autouninstall for plugins. Plugins runs a function that passes
a specific array to a core function that removes all given element of the
plugin. The function inside the plugin can handle aditional removals that
the core code cannot [Oliver]
- Fixed search by date in Calendar (reported and patch provided by Jeffrey Hare)
- Only allow autotags in normal blocks (bug #653) [Dirk]
- Added {story_topic_image_no_align} and {story_anchortag_and_image_no_align}
in stories so that you have access to the topic image without the alignment
(feature request #410) [Dirk]
- Show autotags in story editor to Admin even if all HTML is allowed [Oliver]
- Allow comments to be closed, i.e. display the existing comments but don't
accept any new ones [Dirk]
- Introduced COM_getCharset which returns the currently used character set (to
avoid code duplication). It should be save to simply use $LANG_CHARSET in
most cases, though [Dirk]
- Added optional Wikitext postmode for stories [Oliver]
- Addded optional noreply-email address option to config.php to prevent
spammers retrieving the admin's email address from registering online [Oliver]
- Added support for "Microsummaries" to index.php.
See (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Microsummaries) [Mike]
- Story "Rewrite" - significant re-structure of story code to fix all issues
with posting HTML special characters etc. [Mike]
- Added ability to have Body Text in user submitted stories. To deactivate,
edit layout\theme\submit\submitstory.thtml and submitstory_advanced.thtml
[Mike]
- fixing the dimension-resizing of uploaded images. If an image would be within
the max width after resizing, the max height might still be off. This is
solved with the new code. [Oliver]
- Removed tzcode table and started using PEAR:ate instead since all timezone
information is stored in there. [Oliver]
- Added timezone selector to preferences page [Oliver]
- Fixed COM_getLangSQL() to escape the underscore character '_' which happens
to be a wildcard character when used with LIKE. In a multi-language setup,
this may accidentally display unwanted items (reported by Kenji Ito) [Dirk]
- Addressed problems with the text direction (ltr/rtl) and the hard-coded
English text in admin/sectest.php (reported by LWC) [Dirk]
- Due to a language file change, the login form in users.php ("Try Logging in
Again" now asked for a "new password" (reported by Laugh) [Dirk]
- Remove the "Are you secure?" (getBent) block from the database as its
functionality has been moved to admin/sectest.php (reported by LWC) [Dirk]
- Added config option what should be displayed after user saving [Oliver]
- Added config option what should be displayed after story saving [Oliver]
- Images in articles (inc. topic icon) aligned with float [Oliver]

- New Czech language file for the Calendar and Links plugins, provided
by Ondrej Rusek
- Updated Dutch language files, provided by Ronald Edelschaap
- New Dutch language file for the Calendar plugin, provided by John van Gaal
- Updated French Canadian language files for Geeklog and the Static Pages plugin
and new language files for the Calendar, Links, and Polls plugins, provided
by Jean-Francois Allard
- Updated Japanese language files for Geeklog and all the plugins, provided
by the Geeklog Japanese group
- New Korean language files for Geeklog and most of the plugins, provided
by Tetsuko Komma and Kim Younghie
- Updated Spanish (UTF-8) language file and new Spanish (UTF-8) language files
for all the plugins, provided by Jose R. Valverde

Calendar plugin (1.0.2)
---------------
- The global $_STATES has been removed from Geeklog. The state in an event's
details is now a simple text entry field.
- The form to add an event to the personal calendar was missing the site footer
(reported by Mark Evans) [Dirk]
- Fixed Calendar feeds: The first parameter to the getFeedContent function is
the feed's ID, not the feed limit (bug #659) [Dirk]
- Highlight search queries [Dirk]
- Autouninstall implemented [Oliver]
- Added Batch-Delete functionality [Oliver]
- Added config option what should be displayed after event saving [Oliver]

Links plugin (2.0.0)
------------
- Added owner_id field to submissions to record submitter and align with
stories behavior [Oliver]
- Autouninstall implemented [Oliver]
- Added "Report Broken Link" function [Oliver]
- Added Link Verification to Link Admin [Oliver]
- Added config option what should be displayed after link saving [Oliver]
- Added Link sub-category options [Euan]

Polls plugin (2.0.1)
------------
- Autouninstall implemented [Oliver]
- Added Support for multiple questions grouped into a survey [Oliver]
- Added Support for closing polls [Oliver]
- Added Support for hiding poll results of open polls [Oliver]
- Added config option what should be displayed after event poll [Oliver]

Spam-X plugin (1.1.1)
-------------
- Added support for the ProjectHoneyPot.org http:BL API [Mike]
- Fixed the "edit" modules not working with the French language files (reported
bye Joe) [Dirk]
- Autouninstall implemented [Oliver]
- Fixed an error with the SLV module when $_CONF['site_url'] was empty
(reported by AA6QN) [Dirk]
- Added support for blocking entire IP ranges, using either CIDR notation or
simple x.x.x.x-y.y.y.y ranges [Dirk]

Static Pages plugin (1.5.0)
-------------------
- Bugfix: In a multi-language setup, we need to be able to see all topics for
the centerblock option [Dirk]
- Bugfix: Allow the static pages "page format" setting to override
$_CONF['show_right_blocks'] (reported by Simon Lord) [Dirk]
- New Static pages Autotag: staticpage_content to return the contents of a
static page instead of a link to a static page [Oliver]
- Now using a template to display static pages [Oliver]
- Autouninstall implemented [Oliver]
- The static pages editor was looking for the advanced editor template in the
wrong place, due to an uninitialized variable (reported by k74) [Dirk]
- Allow static pages to replace tags also on PHP-generated content [Oliver]
- Added config option what should be displayed after page saving [Oliver]
- Added comments feature [Oliver]

Hooray! Is it my patch?

Nice work turning an innocent question about GL2 into a thread bashing GL1 development.

And that's as much as I'll say about that.

bye, Dirk

Nevertheless, please say something about my question.

I'm not bashing development and I would never bash its developers. The development methodology on the other hand is fair game to me.

Geeklog is a solid CMS with many advanced features and a true commitment to security and standards compliance. It is also slow to release and those releases seem to be expelled from a black hole when they do occur. This is a major source of frustration. I'm only one of the vocal people who complain about it.

I honestly have no idea. Please check the code in CVS if it matters that much to you. All I know is that you have to provide 2 email addresses now during the installation.

bye, Dirk

Alright then, I've taken a look in the CVS and saw:


It should be either "if this IS the same" or "that replying to those emails is NOT recommended".

But description aside, this is not my patch and it's quite a shame. My patch didn't accept a manual address. Instead it accepted a UID or a username. That way, most people would just use UID 2's e-mail address and change it just once instead of twice everytime they want to change it. Why making something manual when it could be automatic?

So, while you guys sort that out, who can at least point me to the person who is leading the development effort of GL 2.0?
Does such a person exist?

Sure, that would be Tony. There's also so GL2 information in the wiki.

bye, Dirk

Let me state the situation with GL2 so all are clear why nothing has ever been released. The proposed framework for GL2 has been in use for nearly two years. Where I work we've built enterprise level applications using this framework and I'm confident it's ready for primetime. That means that all the major moving parts and design decisions have been made and GL2 coding can take place now. So what's the problem? My job and family commitments don't allow enough time to build entire plugins using the GL2 framework. While I can provide oversight, technical advice building systems as complex as Geeklog can't be done by one person and the current 1.x developers have no interest in contributing to GL2 and my efforts to find reliable help has been futile. We got a lot done in the Google Summer of Code program but it wasn't enough to even finish an alpha release. I continue to poke away at the GL2 codebase with the hopes of at least finishing the content plugin (which would replace articles and staticpages in 1.x) as we could use those features at work. After that I will simply ask the 1.x developers one last time to help out to breathe life into GL2 or I'll simply remove the code base into a separate project that would be marketed more as a PHP framework. That much I know I can keep up-to-date as part of my day-to-day job duties Again, I'm always on the look out for good talent and have a project site together already: http://gl2.tonybibbs.com. --Tony

---

The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.

Tony-
Thank you very much for the input and clarification and status of GL2's dev. 'limbo'.
I wish I were a coder as it is a project I'd love to be able to contribute to in that regard. My background in product management and software development won't build code however. I can build you one hell of a release or integration plan if you need!

The biggest question has been answered, which again, I very much appreciate someone coming to the table to give everyone a better understanding of the project as it stands now and what the future looks like.

Regards-
~Q

That's news. Hey, and there's even a roadmap. My apologies Tony, I didn't know there was a GL2 roadmap. Based on my crazy ideas, maybe I should switch.