e107 progress report

We know everyone is wondering what the status of the latest e107 revisions are and the dev team wants to give everyone a heads up of what's been going on.

We know everyone is wondering what the status of the latest e107 revisions are and the dev team wants to give everyone a heads up of what's been going on.

First of all, as most are aware, we really have two codebases we are working on. There is the current 0.6xx tree and the newer 0.7xx tree. Many of us have been working on both sets of code. Bugfixes only for .6 and all new code for .7. It has been decided to totally stop all development on the 0.6xx codebase. We all decided our efforts and free time were best spent on the new code. The current state of the 0.618 in the CVS will also not be released due to lack of testing, etc.

Now, 0.7! We know some (many) of you have been checking out this code and have some idea of what's to come, but let me list some of the highlights.

* jalist has returned to active dev. He was either really bored or was tired of all the bugs in e107 and wanted to help add some more, we're not sure which

* Upgrading from 0.617 (or .618 CVS if you are running that) will be a simple single-click process. It may be a few more if your host is running in safe mode, but it'll still be easy.

* Admin area has been reworked and templated, SweetAs worked really hard on his jayya theme and it makes the admin area look great.

* Many of the current 'core' items will be moved into plugins. This will make e107 much more modular and allow site admins to remove those parts of e107 they do not use. We currently have forum, site links, content (articles, reviews), and the chatbox done or in the works.

* All areas of e107 will be able to support multilangue, even plugins, with no code modifications.

* Extended user fields will get a total overhaul, making new fields much easier to add and maintain.

* Enhanced debug and timing tools. This will allow developers to see where there code is slow.

* SQL optimization. We are updating many of the queries to allow MySQL to do more of the upfront work for us, speeding up e107 in the process.

* Better theming. We have many more pages that can be templated and may new tools that the themers can harness to make their theme look exactly the way they want.


Believe me, there is much more. By the time we are done, I doubt there will be a single file that will be left untouched. We have the amount of sql queries trimmed considerably already and our test sites are much faster than the 0.618 code.

Release date? Who knows. It really is coming along quite nicely though

Feel free to get ahold of the cvs and take it for a spin, any comments are appreciated.

- On a personal note, I put the idea plugin up and I think I probably did that way too soon. We will eventually get to it and start emplementing any ideas we like, but hopefully some are already getting in there. Please don't think we are totally ignoring you, the users.