Things have gone a bit quiet on the m2f front. George is busy with life these months, and I’ve been working hard on my master studies.

Nevertheless, I will try to move the development forward a bit, albeit not with the rigurosity and elegance of George’s software design. Code like hell activated folks! I built a “pda_mess” branch where I’ll start my work.
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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:
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Hi all,

As I’ve been doing a huge amount of work on the email processing feature of m2f 2.0, I’d like some assistance with testing.

The new functionality is in the Email Import channel. In short, it will convert a multipart email (i.e. one in plain text as well as HTML, or an email with attachments) into a single, flat message suitable for using later in an m2f chain.

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We’ve been testing current MIME handling functionality for a while now, and I must say it’s working quite well! But… what the hell is MIME? Read on (Screenshots available!).

After the initial importing of a message, m2f analyzes the message content in order to understand its structure. If the message is being imported from an email channel, that means looking the current format of the message (ie. html, plain text and so on), checking if the email has attachments (normal attachments or inline attachments), etc. The way that emails handle multiple formats and attachments is called MIME Handling. As quoted from wikipedia:

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Hi everyone!

These have been busy days! George is finishing off MIME handling of email messages and building the general architecture that will eventually support full attachment management between channels.

I have been working in the Feed class, adding export functionality and also did some heavy refactoring to get cleaner code. There are still things to be done, in particular the configuration of the channel in the Admin-Cp, but we are almost there.

I would like to tell you a story about what’s involved in building a channel with the current state of the code (alpha 4):
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Here are a number of useful videos to introduce m2f v2.0 alpha 4, released Feb 11th, 2009.

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Dear m2f community,

The m2f development team are delighted to announce the immediate availability of Alpha release 2.0.0a4. This is an alpha-quality build of the forthcoming v2.0 release, which will see the transformation of m2f from a simple phpBB -> email link into a multi-faceted message hub.

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George has finished developing all of the Milestone 1 features! Right now we are in the process of verifying the release and last-minute bugfixing, but the release of this milestone, also known as “m2f 2.0a4″ (Alpha 4), is imminent.

Beta testers: You’ll have work to do pretty soon! We submitted a new page into our documentation : v2.0 troubleshooting. This page includes bug reporting, testing environment resetting, etc. If you are a beta-tester (and thus member of the beta testers group in the forum), be sure to read that guide and comment!

Oh, and by the way, for sanity’s sake George has improved the configuration procedure for phpBB installations - no more host-key copying&pasting! You can review the updated install instructions on the m2f installation page.

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While George is busy building the threading functionality in SVN, I did a hell of a cleanup in our different information spaces:

• Reactivated the m2f wiki as READ-ONLY. This site has some good information for m2f 1.2, although some of it is outdated. It has been hammered a lot by spammers though, and maintainance was a pain, so I just turned it back on READ-ONLY.
• Added and polished several sections of the 2.0 development page. Be sure to check out the new m2f 2.0 design and the m2f 2.0 threading uses cases pages.
• Cleaned up and updated the announcements in the v1.2 and v2.0 development forums with download, install, etc. instructions (Note that v2.0 developers forum is accesible only for users in the developers group).
• Did other smaller housekeeping tasks.

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Dear m2f’ers, the first milestone is VERY near! We’ll release an private alpha-quality build to developers and the beta-tester team with preliminar functionality:

• Basic Mail to Forum using POP3,SMTP,Sendmail,mbox,phpBB2 and phpBB3
• Some basic channels like FileWriter (Export), Random Text Generator (Import)
• Basic RSS Feed import to any functional export channel (SMTP,phpBBx,FileWriter).
• Forum mirroring! Watch phpBB2 and phpBB3 talk together.
• Basic Admin Control Panel
• Message threading

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