Well, I’m a day late but about to set a record… public notes two weeks in a row! Sometimes you have to take pleasure from the little victories ;)
So this week I found myself facilitating the meeting from our Engineering Office in Abbotsford, BC. The drive up from Seattle was surprisingly pleasant, a mere 2 1/2 hours going against the prevailing commuter traffic. I’ll likely be spending a few days in BC every month, moving forward.
As a reminder, much of what we discuss falls under an NDA. So if I’m sometimes vague, it’s just to hold the suspense *grin*.
And now, on with the notes:
- The Open Force ‘09 call for speakers is almost over. We have some excellent submissions, but there are always room for more. If you’re considering it… follow through! Free admission to Dev Connections and 4 nights at the Mandalay Bay is a pretty good incentive!
- As we are nearing “feature complete” for the 5.1 release, 5.2 roadmap items are getting some discussion. Shaun briefed the team on constraints / options for the UX overhaul we’re planning for 5.2.
- Thursday I had the opportunity to catch up with Jonathan Wanagel & Sara Ford from CodePlex over Tex Mex (well, the closest you can get to it in Seattle, anyway *grin*). Although there was no specific agenda for this meeting, it was a good opportunity to catch up with them and do some strategizing. We have great plans for expanding our Forge and CodePlex is an awesome partner and Open Source advocate. Thanks to Jonathan & Sarah for taking time the day before a release to meet with me!
- One of the great new features in 5.1 is the addition of detailed auditing information. There are still a few areas of auditing being completed and there will likely be some opportunities for configuration and tuning of auditing information learned during our coming beta release period. Thank you Cathal.
- DNN Corp has hired an intern to help us put together some test beds for testing as well (rumor has it that Charles knows the intern…*wink*). We intend to make these test beds available to the public to aid both in actual beta testing… as well as to collect additional feedback for improving the test beds themselves. Bear in mind they are fairly simple at this point but should provide a useful starting point for anyone that wants to help out and to ensure that we have good use case coverage. You’ll hear more about this soon. Team members can download testbeds now from our Fortress.
- We’re sooo close with Forums! Chris Paterra has really been spending time with me to ensure that our forums upgrade is as clean as we can make it. There are so many new and improved features, I can hardly wait! Based on our last round of staging, a few minor items are being addressed in the next build which should be the final one for release.
- By now it’s no longer news, but Andrew Nurse also announced a new version of the Reports Module which is now in the Project Release Tracker.
- There was discussion about a number of known sites that promote themselves as DotNetNuke Sponsors or Benefactors, but which are not. This is an area that we struggle with a little, because our preference is to encourage folks manage themselves. For now, the answer is simply to let me know and allow me to contact folks, some of whom have been sponsors in the past but perhaps not updated their sites to reflect the change in status. Other cases can be more difficult but we try to work things out with everyone amicably. Thank you to the team, however, for understanding and desiring to help us all maintain an ecosystem of trust.
- The last discussion was a very long one but one which has great promise, particularly for the primarily non-English speakers in our community. For anyone who may not know, non-English speakers represent about half of the DotNetNuke user base, we are truly an international project. I had commissioned some of our international team members to work with me to improve our Language Pack management support, primarily from a distribution standpoint. Taking it one step further, these guys are hard at work helping to create some tools which will make it easier to not only find and retrieve language packs.. but (and this is the REALLY cool part to me) also to make it easier for folks to CONTRIBUTE to language pack creation. I’m looking forward to being able to share more about this in coming weeks. But for now, thanks in particular to Peter Donker, Ernst Peter Tamminga & Vicenç Masanas.
- Also, Timo Breumelhof has been working with me for quite a while to put together a new skinning contest for DNN 5.x. This has taken longer than expected for a number of reasons, but I am very pleased at what he has managed to put together and folks should expect to be hearing about it within the next couple weeks. It would be sooner, but Timo is taking a well deserved vacation this next week… *grin*. Thank you for everything, Timo!
And we managed to do it all in 90 minutes ;)
Cheers, everyone… until next week.
Scott