> I am curious to know what the road map looks like for webgen. It is a
> fantastic program that seems to have endless options.
The usual approach in developing webgen in the last years was working
on the current version till some requested/wanted feature does not work
with the current architecture. The stable version was developed further
but an additional development version was introduced with a new
architecture that allowed for all the previous features as well as
allowing the feature(s) that did not work on the old architecture.
webgen 0.5.x is special in this regard: Its development started around
Februar 2007 and at the end of 2007 it was nearly completed. I
did not have the time to finish it, so development in Jan/Feb
2008 was basicaly non-existent. As I had time again in March, I
looked through the sources and thought that the new core became,
hm... lets say cumbersome and I decided to basically throw away
everything and start from scratch again. The result is the current,
public 0.5.x series. Not all the development that went into the never
released 0.5.x series was lost - I used a substantial amount in the
0.5.x series, especially for the extensions (the new Webgen Page
Format, partial site regeneration, the new menu tag, ...).
So, regarding the road map for the 0.5.x series: I have some ideas of
what I want to implement but nothing is fixed yet. It mostly depends
upon what the users of webgen want to have in the next releases.
However, a rough road map would be this:
0.5.4 (2008-09-07):
- Minor enhancements
- bug fixes
- documentation fixes
- better ruby project support (out-of-the-box support)
0.5.5 (~2008-09-30):
- reintroduce support for resources
- support for arbitrary HTML headers (similar to 0.4.x htmlmetainfo)
- Better blogging support
- tag handler (automatically generates tag pages)
- tags for blog related things (e.g. tag cloud, what else???)
- blog handler
0.5.6 (~2008-10-30)
- port gallery handler
- port sipttra handler
- content processors for rdiscount and others
- content processor for smiley-to-emoticon conversion
I don''t know if I can make biweekly release from October onwards but I
try to make at least monthly ones! The above stated road map can not be
regarded as to be carved in stone - if users want/need a particular
feature earlier I will try to implement it earlier. There may also be
other smaller release between those listed for fixing bugs and updating
documentation.
Last but not least: the currently used core architecture is quite
extensible and should support all features of previous webgen versions
as well as new features (like partial site regeneration, dynamic
extension loading, ...). However, time has shown that there are always
features that cannot be implemented on top of an architecture. If such
a feature springs into existence (it does nearly every year, have a
look at the release dates of the major new webgen versions) and demands
attention, it may take some time to properly address it, maybe
even a new 0.6.x version of webgen is needed.
So, to sum up:
* Request any features you want, I will evaluate them and try to
implement them
* The "road map" is in no way fixed, just let me know when and what
you want.
* Blogging support is finally coming to webgen, really soon now :)
There will be another mail regarding this, hoping for support and
ideas from YOU!
-- Thomas