This is Roller's quarterly board report for November 2008. It covers community health, status of our most recent release, work that has been done in the trunk and plans for new work.
(Unchanged since last report) 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.
Two San Jose State University students, Ganesh Mathrubootham and Tanuja Varkanthe, are working on a two-semester project to improve Roller's Media Blogging features. This includes better management of media files images, video and audio files, new user interfaces for browsing and selecting media files and more. They've been doing extensive work on the Roller wiki to create a proposal and detailed design for this work, which you can find here: Proposal Media Blogging Support. Just last week we created a branch for the development of these new features, which will eventually (we hope) find their way in to the trunk.
(Unchanged since last report) 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.
(Unchanged since last report) Development activity still relatively 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.
Dave Johnson spoke on the topic of Roller at the Open Source Days conference in Copenhagen, Denmark on October 4, 2008. He covered this history of the project, current status and his thoughts about the future of the project.