Today we have an announcement about the future direction of CMS Made Simple. After extensive discussion amongst the development team regarding our roadmap, we’ve made a decision which we know is the best way to continue ongoing development of the software. This decision relates to the development and release of “CMSMS 2.0”. The CMSMS 1.x series has been extremely popular. Through developing the core of this series we have come to appreciate a number of things that were not so apparent at the time of first conceptualizing “CMSMS 2.0”. The 1.X series has continued to get more users, features, capabilities and modules, including some of the ideas from the "2.0" branch (though implemented differently). All of this has resulted in the fact that the "2.0" branch as originally thought out has become outdated. “CMSMS 2.0” was to be the next generation of content management systems for everybody going forward. It would include things like content versioning and workflow stuff for enterprises, multi-language capabilities, a hierarchical permissions manager, an extensive ORM (object relational mapping) tool for developers and much more. We envisioned slowing the development on further CMSMS 1.x releases at around the 1.3 stage and focusing primarily on “CMSMS 2.0”.. At that time we knew we would be facing a complete rewrite and a daunting task with module compatibility. However we knew that we would be able to overcome these issues and given enough time we could solve these problems. Of course we knew that the 1.x series would have a long life even after "2.0" came out, but envisioned slowly fading out support for 1.x as modules caught up. However at this time it has not worked out. The development of the 1.X series, where we’ve been able to provide solutions at a fairly fast rate has, by necessity, been more important. After all, that is the software that’s being used. Plus of course, as this is an open source and voluntary project, we have to share our time on it with paid work, families and life in general! As a result the of the ongoing development of 1.X we have found time and time again that the starting efforts we had made on “CMSMS 2.0” required re-doing due to changes in the underlying framework, or to lessons we had learned in the 1.X stream. Eventually three or more years had gone by, slowly working on the foundations of “CMSMS 2.0” and steadily improving 1.x. Yet we were still facing a ‘complete rewrite’ for "2.0". As mentioned at the start of this announcement the Dev team has discussed all of these issues extensively many times and again at our most recent Dev team meeting. We knew that the community could not be kept hanging indefinitely. Thus we have come to the decision that our time and resources are best used by continuing to evolve the 1.X series. At this time we are officially shelving the “CMSMS 2.0” project as it was described. The good news is that all of you that have invested thousands of person hours and thousands of dollars into developing websites for, modules for, and web applications in CMS Made Simple can rest easy that your investment is sound. We have not lost faith or momentum in the Content Management System that we all know and love. Instead of writing a whole new CMS we will evolve it over time to accommodate the features that we want and still maintain our original focus and goals. The best ideas and lessons learned from the "2.0" experiment will be migrated into the 1.x series over time. We are evolving towards a more modular, better performing system allowing third party modules to tie further into the system, or even replace some of the functionality. Features like centralized module templates and better content flexibility will slowly move from the "2.0" experiment into reality in the 1.x series. We will continue to implement more ideas, optimizations and features that we find useful that we never thought of when "2.0" was born such as better support for mobile devices and admin side search. Our next release CMS 1.10 is a step towards implementing some of the changes planned for the "2.0" series. We are sure you will understand the reasoning behind our decision. We hope you look forward to a ongoing investment in your favorite content management system, just as we look forward to continue to work with you.