Week 1 of e107 v2 Bootstrap – the work continues
The latest on the new v2 Bootstrap Alpha 2 release, support plans, knowledge base, and inspiration corner
Celebrating e107 v2 Bootstrap Alpha 2 Release’s first week...
Hello again e107 fans and users! It’s been a week since we announced that e107 v2 Bootstrap has taken the next step in its evolution path and launched a brand new website.
The new website is running on e107 v2 Bootstrap and is a real signal to our community that we are convinced v2 Bootstrap is stable enough to start being used on some live sites across the web, even its Alpha Release state. Whilst there are many features still in development, we hope those of you who have had a chance to test v2 Bootstrap are finding it far more responsive than our legacy v1. There are lots of features to be excited about both in terms of simple improvements like in-line editing that will save users hundreds of unnecessary clicks, but also far more ambitious features turning e107 into a platform that can deploy alongside your social media presences.
So don’t hesitate to check it out and grab a copy of the new version to test on your site too!
Admittedly, we still have quite a journey to complete before v2 Bootstrap is declared final, but we are confident that we can get there with your support and your feedback on bugs and issues you are encountering posted on GitHub.
Our top priority is making your feedback actionable, quicker.
We know some of you are concerned about our decision to stop using a bulletin board as the main platform for channelling community feedback and fielding support queries. As a team, we really have spent a lot of time reviewing what the e107 core team should commit to delivering for the community moving forward without promising things it doesn’t have the capacity to provide.
This informed the decision to reposition e107.org to become the platform to grab e107, get the latest development news, showcase what it can do, and inspire users to download it.
It is also the hub pointing you to the other externally-hosted websites for technical development (GitHub), support (StackOverflow), and community banter (Facebook, Twitter).
For the team delivering e107, our top priority is to ensure that bugs and feedback can be channelled in a way that allows a small volunteer development team [we're less than 10 people!] to prioritise issues raised and process them more quickly. We have found GitHub to be a tremendous platform for this. It allows us to work directly with you when you encounter bugs in a way that simply wasn’t possible on the forums. Check it out, you can see a lot of user-raised issues are getting responses directly from our main contributors, including the project founders!
Also, if you've got coding skills, we're in need of your help, so don't hesitate to contribute and join the development team on GitHub to accelerate the development process!
The new support infrastructure – it’s a work in progress!
We wanted to thank users who have bravely started using StackOverflow and GitHub as the new platforms to ask for peer-to-peer assistance. We were shocked to hear that users were having trouble posting on StackOverflow because you lacked the necessary reputation points to do so. We’ve run some tests to understand why users haven’t been able to post to StackOverflow. Our tests have identified that users had forgotten to tag their questions to “e107â€. If you use the e107 tag you do not need a high reputation score to post a question or to receive a response. So please make sure to do that beforehand, and you shouldn’t experience any more problems raising issues!
StackOverflow offers a pretty good tour to use to get familiarised with the platform. Check it out here.
These difficulties have nonetheless led us to put the infrastructure under further review. We’ve decided to give StackOverflow a trial period of 3 months to see how it pans out for the community, if we can see that there are just too many issues, we’ll be approaching some e107 community leaders to look at other ways in which peer-to-peer support can be provided away from the main e107.org presence.
Want to figure out how to do something? Check out the Knowledge Base, including the retired forums!
e107 has been around for a long time, and hundreds of users have helped to shape it to become the platform that it is today. A knowledge base for the e107 Legacy versions has been built up over many years that is important to keep alive, so we wanted to take this opportunity to point out the new knowledge base section of our website.
It features the growing documentation library for v2 Bootstrap, but we’ve also made the retired forums an integral part of that knowledge base especially for v1 users. We’re working on dropping the pesky password protection so that everyone can have access to and can search the forums in case you have an e107 v1 issue that was already solved.
Access to these forums has never been taken down, but we weren’t shouting about it to give you a chance to trial StackOverflow first and get all the details about the new site and v2 Bootstrap. We’re hoping to be able to apply further tweaks to integrate the legacy forums into the main site in a more seamless manner but this will take some time.
So if you make a habit of referring to the forums, know that they are there for consultation!
Getting closer to debuting the Inspiration Corner
One big part of the site that you haven’t had a chance to see yet is the new Inspiration Corner which will feature showcase articles and interviews from users of e107, it will provide interesting how-to articles on the new features, and we’re hoping that it will also grow into the place to go to for the tips and tricks to make e107 even more useful to you as the engine of your fully featured website.
Inspiration Corner is a space intended to be driven by e107 users for e107 users and accessible direct on the homepage, so if you have ideas about what should be featured in Inspiration Corner, want to shout about the cool things you’re up to on your e107 powered website, have an awesome new theme to showcase, then these are things we also shout about alongside you!
If you’re interested in featuring as a contributor to the Inspiration Corner, please let us know on Facebook, Twitter, or even the community-created Google+ group and a team member will get in touch with you to get the article ready for publication.
We’re really excited some of our users have already agreed to contribute to the Corner and are busy working on some very insightful articles which we are sure will create lots of food for thought!
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was e107
All right, that about wraps it up for this update... We hope that these updates are providing a useful overview of what’s on the team’s to-do list, and we know that there are still plenty of kinks to work on, but keep an eye on the website and our social media presences and we’ll do our utmost to keep you informed as e107 v2 Bootstrap continues on its development path!