DRAFT of Roller board report, will submit this eve

[Dave <sn...@gmail.com>]

I have prepared a DRAFT of the quarterly board report here:
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/x/Q2sB

I have also included the complete text below in case anybody would
like to comment on specific parts of the report. I would like to
submit the report by midnight tonight -- sorry about the short notice.

Thanks,
- Dave




This is my quarterly board report for August 2008. It covers community
health, status of our most recent release, work that has been done in
the trunk and plans for new work.


h2. Community health

Development activity is still slow due to committers working on other
projects and the fact that Roller 4.0 is stable and works well as is.
User support questions are coming in at a steady clip and the mailing
list is responding to them adequately.


h3. Activity begets activity and vice versa

Lack of activity is a problem for the community, because it makes the
project appear to be stagnant and that discourages new users, which
reduces the pool of new community members. So, I will briefly discuss
why we have lack of activity and ways we can address the issue.

One reason for the lack of activity is that two high-profile projects
that use Roller (and employ or employed committers) are now operating
on forks of the code base and the committers have stopped
contribiuting back to Roller. Why did they fork? I believe this is due
to the instability that was caused by our Apache policy required move
away from Hibernate/LGPL and move to OpenJPA. Those two high-profile
projects are still not using our new implementation and perhaps cannot
justify the time required to get back in sync with main-line Roller
development.


h3. Ways to get active

How can we get some activity going again? Here are some ideas:

* Make Roller more pluggable so that new features can be added without
de-stabilizing the core of Roller.
* Make it easier to contribute with better guidelines for new
developers and less emphasis on proposal; patches should be prefered
over proposals.
* Learn a lesson from GSoC. Define some projects that we want to have
developed, advertise our need for help on the projects and be prepared
to mentor volunteers.
* Wrap up bug fixes and release Apache Roller 4.0.1


h2. Status of Apache Roller 4.0

Roller 4.0 is the best available release of Roller. We have made
enough bug fixes in the 4.0 code base to justify a 4.0.1 release,
users have tested snapshot builds and we should wrap things up and
make a final 4.0.1 release as soon as possible.


h2. Status of work in the trunk

Here's some of the work we've done since 4.0 was release. The user
management work is probably significant enough to justify calling the
next release 5.0. We need to decide whether to push a new release out
soon as is, or later with better plugin support.

* We added a new fully pluggable user management system and better
support for contributed by Dave Johnson working on Sun's social
software for Glassfish efforts.
* Our Google Summer of Code student has completed OpenID support,
using Spring Security to do. We are currently evaluating the final
patch.
* Dave Johnson started working on upgrading from OpenJPA 0.9.7 to
OpenJPA 1.0 but ran in to problems and has committed none of this
work.
* Allen Gilliland contributed his most recent code for Apache Roller
Planet, from his work on planets.sun.com. This is a separate
application from the Apache Roller Weblogger and has not yet been
released.


h2. Plans for new work

Two students have signed up, as part of the Glassfish community
outreach programs, and applied to work on a project I proposed called
Media Blogging for Roller to improve support for file uploads and
blogging about uploaded pictures, audio and video files. Expect to see
them on the mailing lists before the end of August.


h2. Promoting the project

My talk was rejected at ApacheCon US, but will be speaking at Open
Source Days on the topic of [The Once and Future
Roller|http://www.opensourcedays.org/2008/agenda/sessions/DaveJohnson.shtml],
where I'll tell the story of Roller and my thoughts on the
intersection of Roller/blogging and social networking.

Re: DRAFT of Roller board report, will submit this eve

[Dave <sn...@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Dave <sn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have prepared a DRAFT of the quarterly board report here:
> http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/x/Q2sB
>
> I have also included the complete text below in case anybody would
> like to comment on specific parts of the report. I would like to
> submit the report by midnight tonight -- sorry about the short notice.

FYI: I submitted this report last night, but feedback on any of the
content is welcome.

- Dave