May’2009 update

Hi everyone. May update? Where is April’s update you may ask?

As you already know, in these open source projects sometimes real life gets in the way, but after almost 9 years of development we can say with confidence that we always return to m2f!

Well, m2f 2.0 is a complex design-focused message hub. Email handling complexity by itself is a big deal, and that is only one (albeit one of the most important) of the channels that m2f 2.0 supports. So, prioritizing is an important part of our development plans, remember we have only one senior developer (George) and one junior developer (me) right now. If you need m2f and can give us a hand (ie. 2-5 hours a week) then be sure to drop us a line - pm GeorgeC or Pda0 on the forum.

The current state of m2f 2.0 already allows for basic chaining of email, phpbb2, phpbb3, feed and other minor channels. Messages get threaded and attachments get processed, in a basic level (For more info read about MIME handling on previous blog posts). In general, the core m2f functionality is there, even though still in a immature state. One of the fun things that you can already do, and wasn’t possible with m2f 1.x, is binding phpbb2 and phpbb3 together (Or two phpbb3 installations together).

So, what’s next. There so many tasks lurking on the tracker, that we need some strategy to slowly crunch each of them. At the moment we have three objectives that drives our development priorities:

1. The requirement of one of our sponsors that needs m2f working with mailman+phpbb3 asap.
2. Build a very simple m2f beta-quality solution involving only some of the functionality.
3. Reorganize milestones from functionality classes to integral and incremental functionality releases.

Point 1 mainly focuses in mailman<->phpbb3 integration.

In point 2, we are building a feed->phpbb3 solution that can be released as a separate, beta-quality MOD release. Even though this task will divert us a bit from the main line of development, it will help us get a bigger userbase of users/testers and also prove the new concepts in production environments.

Point 3 deserves some explanation. If you look at the milestones in the tracker, you will see that requirements are grouped thinking in the types of functionality that are needed. For example “Email features” or “messagers & filters”, and so on. This helped the development a bit, as developers can focuse in one type of problem at a time, but it also greatly reduced the integral functionality of a m2f release. We want to change that strategy so that every m2f release has a bit of functionality from each class, and thus is more practical for normal use.

Other than these, we’ve been working in finishing Feed channel and other general design improvements. In latest SVN, Feed no longer (re)imports feed posts that were already imported in previous chain runs. Also there are big improvements in the html->bbcode parser.

Stay tuned!

.pd