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.
