Since jri’s master branch on github was merged into the no-properties branch we’re talking about deepamehta in version 4 here! And that’s why i thought it’s more than time now to give you a pointer to where all the dm4 research & development is happening so you can find and join us, we really could need your help right now.
So what’s up? We lately started planning the next releases as a team and the nice thing about the process is, it delivers us the comfort of predictability about upcoming developments in time. For example we just yesterday looked at the last minor release cycles and saw that a minor release comes out of the lab every 4 weeks. The hard part of that new process is, that we have to commonly agree on the next set of developments which are going to be realized and therefore we try to give each major release a topic, like 4.1 is now called “usability” and 4.2 will focus on a set of “security features”. For all our input related to planning the upcoming releases of the current deepamehta software platform we setup the DeepaMehta Community Trac, which is already quite lively since it’s start in June/July. The Community Trac contains for example the main ticket queue where developers and friendly testing users discuss and report about the development of all deepamehta plugins, as well we started the wiki in the trac as the shared notebook for feature discussion and related research, various documentations and for the collection of old and new user stories.
At the 9th of October we met and talked about how facets will be realized for the deepamehta software platform, and it either could be done as part of the core, as an extension for all other plugins or tightly coupled to the kiezatlas-2.0plugin jri’s recently started to work on. The kiezatlas-2.0-plugin is the origin of the requirements for multi-typing an instance of a topic but we decided to go the slightly longer way, to build this facet-plugin not as part of the deepamehta-core. In the Kiezatlas Scenario, and as we’ve seen in many other cases too, the same information needs to be presented and navigated in more than one context, so the idea is that an instance of an information can has n-extended models associated. That’s the origin of this new extension and it’s aimed to be an extension to the meta-model of the platform.
After that meeting we briefly started working on a new website which hopefully can be launched by the end of this year and replace the front-view of deepamehta.de. Thumbs pressed, your thoughts on the deepamehta communications are very welcome here, too. Some cornerstones of the new website are already clear; It will be a multi-language, starting with german and english content. And it will try to address various communities on the frontpage which are namely ordinary users, motivated developers and the scientific community. I suggested to have a more detailed look on the information architecture of some mozilla pages as well as to establish a new messageboard/forum on the website, since it was one of the more livelier parts of our last website where users could help users, we will see how it turns out. I am very thankful that Silke, Ingo and Christiane finally started to tackling the overdue issue of having an old project website and since i heard of this initiative, i am super happy, looking forward and having fun to contribute to their work as much as i can.
At the 26th of October, just few days ago, we all met again and this time we talked about and updated the ticket queue to reflect the latest major release plannings, as well as about the first structure of the upcoming new project website. Also we divided some tasks and tried to find solutions on how core-development will be financed from January 2012 on.
One little pre-announcement: The mailing lists are about to change again till the end of this year cause the faithful servant who was with the deepamehta project right from the beginning, BerliOS, who’s still the provider of all our current mailing lists, former bug trackers and main repositories just a couple of days ago announced the end of service. So expect a change happen to our mailinglists you’ve signed up to. Today we started routing to http://lists.deepamehta.de, our new mailing-lists interface will soon show up there.
Finally, there’s again a call for to all you friendly users, please test one of our latest binary releases, though it’s still not ready for keeping your data, we kindly ask you to test the basic functionality of all the latest features and gui enhancements described here, with your personal computing device. It’s a heck of a lot what happened lately and now is the time to tune in again. These days we will also update our freshest firefox extension for deepamehta-users, it’s just that we, like everyone else i guess, have to keep up with the new release cycle of all the nice mozillians.
We are thankful for any contribution and wish everyone happy testing. Bye Bye.
Dear DeepaMehta Folks,
