Development Roadmap
The Dev Team is providing this Development Roadmap in an effort to improve transparency and community participation. It is a living document, subject to change as trends, requirements, and available resources change.
Important Message Regarding the 2.3 Beta
In 2019 we released the 2.3 beta for public testing. While many of the new features received positive feedback, there was a lot of uncertainty about the lack of backwards compatibility, and the direction of the project as a whole not being driven by community feedback or even a majority of the Dev Team.
To this end, we (the Dev Team) have resolved to:
- Restructure the Dev Team to allow more member participation. [DONE]
- Strive to make the Dev Team more inclusive and democratic, and actively seek new members. [ongoing]
- Require a majority of the Dev Team members to approve all major feature and direction changes. [DONE]
- Facilitate more community input through surveys and other channels. [done and ongoing]
- Modernize the development process to allow more community involvement in coding. [big TO DO]
- Reorganize the hosting and other technical aspects of providing software to allow more Dev Team involvement. [DONE]
The 2.3 beta has been officially discontinued. We will be incorporating most of the features into the next major releases, but in a more inclusive way. We are committed to our existing userbase and acknowledge that there are differing skill levels, workflow preferences, and needs. While we can't be all things to all people, we understand that many of your (and our) livelihoods depend on CMSMS being stable and supported.
Roadmap
2.x
- Minor bug fixes and security patches only.
- Deprecate individual page SSL settings, remove from new installs.
- No longer install Menu Manager.
- Continue improving PHP 8.x support.
- Update libraries and licenses as needed.
2.99
- Transitional release to facilitate upcoming major changes.
3.0 Initial Release
- Support for latest PHP full version at or around release date.
- New accessibility enabled admin theme.
- Begin improvements to admin theme API to make creation of custom admin themes more accessible to designers.
- 503 page: New page type for Site Down message.
- Plugins: new Smarty plugins for JS, stylesheets, and meta tags.
- Improve UDT functionality - allow file-based without removing existing interface.
- Update or rewrite News module. Backwards compatibility to be maintained (if a replacement module is created, migration will be possible).
- Improvements to file-based themes, with the eventual goal of making Design Manager optional (but still supported).
- Improve Hooks and Events mechanisms.
- Smarty Caching: fix or remove.
- Individual page SSL: removed.
- Improvements to Admin Log.
- Un-deprecate mailer module, changes for licensing compatibility.
Minor performance, security, and usability improvements are assumed in all versions and not itemized.
