Every two weeks, we host a meeting for all the members of the 6 Community Teams (Health, Forge, Internationalization, Quality, Experience and Reference). Since its a live meeting (we use GoToMeeting), its not always easy for everyone to attend in various places around the world depending upon when it occurs during their workday or evening. This is just one of those challenges we’ve been living with for the last 7 years *grin*.
It was, as it usually is, a good meeting today. I’ll give you a few discussion highlights.
- Learned that Shaun is not only speaking at the Day of DotNetNuke event in France, but also at an Open Source event in Ecuador as well as meeting at DevConnections in April with Navin and folks from telerik.
- A reminder that Blog release candidate 3 is out and looking forward to a final release (it needs to go through the release tracker yet).
- Lots of submissions for speakers for DNN Connections this year... going to be an awesome event!
- Charles spoke about new development in the current sprint, working toward compatibility with ASP.Net 4.0 which is soon to be released. Also some additional smarts in the application installer, reduced default page load time and enhancements to taxonomy features (think folksonomy).
- Shaun also identified some fixes and enhancements to localization features including properly exposing items in the API as well as localizable Portal Settings
- Joe spoke to maintenance items including fixes to facilitate easier Amazon EC2 deployment, updating the telerik DLL to the Q1 release and the return of the “admin only” borders by setting as well as settings which ease integration of some features like profile page.
- For our module teams, any module that expects to be included in the next release must be through the release tracker by a week from tomorrow. XML and Form and List modules will likely have updates!
- The Store module is undergoing enhancements recommended by our security team which include AES encryption. Thanks Gilles!
- Internally, we are working on updates the User Group Wizard, Community Recognition metrics collection and still finishing off the skinning contest ( a few more prizes to deliver ).
Each of our Community Teams gave a brief update also… they meet separately on the weeks the whole team does not.
- Health: Team members aligning with each of the other teams to ensure good representation… this is to ensure teams are equipped and empowered. This team organization is still relatively new and improving.
- Reference: Ernst Peter has established a baseline for API documentation that will be in the next release and we’re setting up automated generation of API documentation in multiple formats. When things are squared away we’ll be able to get to work on the whole API!
- Forge: Still cleaning up Codeplex and resolving unattached projects. But getting ready to begin earnestly designing the next generation Forge! We’ll be involving the Experience team and community input as we seek to transform the Forge into a vibrant destination for open source projects and community members looking for awesome extensions. Also preparing a sweep of existing DNN bundled projects to set them on a path to be refreshed and improved.
- Experience: Still recovering from the Skinning Contest! Brainstorming next tasks, answering forum posts… and pursuing updates to the Extension installer to improve the DNN 5 skin installation experience. Selected Balsamiq as design mockup tool for the teams and will start using with vigor.
- Quality: Phil demo’d the MVP framework implementation and testing using both Unit Testing and Watin. Video is being produced for use in a public blog which we should see sometime next week.
- Internationalization: Excellent first meeting with the team and our new DNN Product Manager, Israel Martinez, as well as Shaun & Cathal… solid commitment to progress on content localization.
The rest of our time was spent talking about items that have been discussed at length in the forums this week. There was good frank discussion and excellent feedback. The folks on the Community Teams are thoughtful, committed and provide excellent feedback. It’s also an excellent opportunity to go through issues conversationally, which is much more fruitful than posting or blogging for seeking an understanding of peoples point of view.
We still have a lot of work to do. What is not always seen is that we are indeed working at it! We’ll all be working to see if we can make those things more visible for you.
Hope this has value, count on it every two weeks after our regular meeting.
Cheers!