CMSMS | CMS Made Simple

For the first time seven members of the core development met in person. Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital, was the host city of this meeting.

Core team members attending were (from top left): Samuel Goldstein (SjG), Tatu Wikman (tsw), Daniel Westergren (westis), René Helminsen (reneh), Morten Poulsen (Silmarillion), Ted Kulp (Ted), and Keith Lauchlan (Utter).

We got together for three productive days to plan the future of CMS Made Simple. Here’s an overview of what we discussed.

Organisation

First up we looked at transforming the organisation around CMSMS to give ourselves a more formal structure, enable applications for grants and loans and put the whole outfit on a more stable footing.

Many other open source groups have formed non-profit foundations and that’s the model we’re looking to.

Responsible: Samuel and Keith

Promotion and Marketing

Given how great CMSMS really is we’re way behind with getting the message out there. Keith and Daniel will be far more rigorous at targeting the online and print-based press with articles and information on our product. This involves becoming more aware of who our target audience really is and pushing CMSMS at them more aggressively.

One way of putting CMSMS on the map would be to put together a book with a publisher like Packt. Since we’re now one of the finalists in the Packt CMS Awards this may be a real possibility and will be pursued over the next few weeks.

Other topics touched on were:

• a much better themes site (Tatu will work on this) and a competition to design the new CMSMS site (already launched)
• better screencasts of important tasks on the site, as well as new features in new versions
• better feature list on the site (completed)

Responsible: Keith and Daniel

Documentation

• Ted joined the documentation team for taking the lead in core and module developer documentation.

• We will move the documentation from the wiki to CMSMS pages. We will also make use of the Comments and Questions modules. This way it will be properly centralised and easier to locate.

  Only members of the Documentation Team will be able to add and edit articles, but anyone can make comments to improve the documentation. This way we keep better control of what is in the documentation, while still letting users contribute. We’re still working on how the documentation may be multi-lingual in this system. Most likely only English, German and French will be available until CMSMS 2.0 makes multi-lingual sites easier. (Daniel)

• A new print functionality will be written that can combine pages into one page and export them to PDF. This should eventually allow for the creation of screen and print versions of docs right out of CMSMS. (Morten and Ted).

• More screencasts will be produced about how to accomplish different tasks and to present how CMSMS works for new users. All these and any other forms of media used to document the sitebuilding process could be included on CD with the book. (Tatu)

Documentation on the site will eventually be separated into 4 areas:

• FAQ
• Tutorials
• Handbook for everything
• Developer documentation (API, module writing etc.)

The new documentation structure should be up and running within three weeks.

Responsible: Gunnar

Training

There was a fair bit of discussion around how to organise CMSMS training and it was felt that we first needed to do some fairly extensive market research to determine who wanted it and where in the world they were likely to be. Amongst the suggestions were that training could be dispensed in a variety of ways such as at annual gatherings or even regularly from specific locations (say, once a month in London etc.)

It was also suggested that we could operate a sort of franchise structure so that ‘approved’ CMSMS developers or users would be recommended for training using specific training materials developed from the documentation when it was finished.

On a more advanced basis, companies could be offered commercial training packages for developers and users.

A poll will be put up on the CMSMS site to gauge the level of interest for this although nothing too ambitious is likely to be undertaken until the documentation is ready.

As with many aspects of the discussion it was felt that the organisational and promotional aspects of elements like training would become simpler when/if there was a foundation group.

This is a more long-term project.

Themes site

As was mentioned earlier in this article, the Themes site is seen as an important contributor to the success of CMSMS.

The discussion centered around how to structure the site more like the one at www.oswd.org so that themes could be better categorised, previewed, rated, commented upon and downloaded.

Responsible: Tatu

Modules and the new forge

The present forge is too inflexible and needs rewriting. Samuel is creating the new Forge in Ruby on Rails and it will hopefully be complete by the end of the year. A QA team will be responsible for testing and overseeing modules and projects

Some of the new and improved features will include:

• modules can be recommended: yes/no set by QA team (with version)
• a “works for me / doesn’t work for me” feature (along with CMS version, module version, PHP version and comments) submitted by users
• comments and ratings: specify which version of module comment and rating applies to. Admin has delete button for comments
• ability to have a matrix or some other means to say what version of CMSMS a module works with
• ability to set modules as outdated if they haven’t had activity in a certain amount of time
• Optional field for next planned release
• Modules can be tagged and categorised with a tag cloud for project category
• news, with RSS
• most recently released modules, with RSS
• a subscription feature for bugs, features and projects

In addition, there’ll be changes to the admin of a CMSMS install to reflect these improvements:

• ModuleManager will show only modules compatible to installed version
• ModuleManager will show module name, module version, last release date, recommended (or not)

Responsible: Samuel

Translations

• The translations will be stored in a database, rather than in files like now. That will make it possible to dynamically update translations from the admin panel without having to wait for a new release of the core or a module.
• The changelog will be split up, so that it’s easier for translators to see when the changelog has been updated and needs translation.
• It will be possible to change translations locally, i.e. for a specific site. When the translation is updated it will not overwrite the local translation.
• Ways for translators to be notified when there are new translations to be made, on a module-per-module basis.
• Sorting language strings by new, updated, all etc.
• Re-usable language strings from the core (submit, cancel, apply etc.)
• More tweaks to make life easier for translators

Responsible: Reneh

CMSMS Version 1.2

1.2 is going to be the last supported 1.x version. After 1.2 is released there will be a feature freeze and only bug and security fixes will be released. From now on all development will be focused on version 2.0.

Responsible: Robert

CMSMS Version 2.0

There’s been plenty written about the next version of CMSMS. These are a few extra ideas we discussed. One idea was to split the language files so as to use less memory, not having to load everything, like admin/front page. We also thought admin users can create new menus and assign to user groups. The admin theme will be an easily editable xml file.

• Module upgrade warning + automatic backups
• Roadmap for 2.0 is
• early-Dec: pre-beta
• Dec 20: 2.0 beta1
• Jan 15: Final beta
• Feb 5: RELEASE!!!

Responsible: Ted

The End

We spent a couple of hours bug-busting and then went to the pub…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Development, General, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.