Thoughts on v2.1 ...

Now that v2.0 has hit beta, its time for us to start thinking (and working) on v2.1. Yes, I know many of you have not yet downloaded v2.0 beta. Please consider downloading and testing the release NOW. This help us release a higher quality product :) Due to the nature of open source schedules (which are random AND non-deterministic), v2.0 is being released at approximately the same time as Joomla v1.5 and Drupal v6.0. This is definitely not ideal, but since we did not have a good idea of when either CMS would be actually released, it made scheduling more difficult. Hence 2.0 does not have support for either Joomla v1.5 or Drupal v6.0 We plan to release v2.1 in a much shorter time frame than our prior point releases. We've been averaging approx 3 - 4 releases / year. This means a new release every 3-4 months. We suspect we'll squeeze this time frame to 2-3 months for v2.1 and get it out sooner rather than later. I also suspect that v2.1 will NOT support Drupal v5.x and Joomla v1.0.x (maintaining backward compatibiity is in general quite painful and not worth the hassle involved). From my brief look into Drupal 6, the menu structure has changed a fair amount making backward compatibility harder. From a conversation with dave greenberg, we decided on a set of principles to guide us for a point release. This is a work in progress and we tweak / modify it as we learn more about the community, open source development and other worldy matters :)

• Improve one CiviCRM component significantly by addressing a couple of major and a lot of minor issues. This has worked very well in the recent past with CiviMail getting a major upgrade in v1.9 and CiviEvent getting quite a few features in v2.0.
• Improve usability and workflow by adding at least one major AJAX feature and a few minor AJAX features in the product.
• Improve a core feature which was designed early on in the 1.x cycle. In v2.0 we've addressed some long standing schema issues. We hope to address and fix search, import and permissioning over the next few releases
• The community has tons of great ideas of how to improve / simplify things. Incorporate at least a few of these recommendations. Also incorporate a few good ideas from other commercial / open source products in the marketplace.
• Incorporate a feature into each release that has been externally funded. A part of v1.9 was funded by a client. CiviCase and CiviGrant in v2.0 were also funded projects. This helps us on the revenue side and also gives the CiviCRM developers some insight into how users use / customize the product.

Given the above, here is the first draft of some of the features we think that will make it into v2.1. Please let us know what your thoughts are on this list along with the things you would like to see addressed.

Comments

Hi,

Have You considered just a quick 2.0.1 update to Drupal 6.0 - without the improvements planned in 2.1?

thanks for the great work You are doing :-)
Bo

2.1 will not be compatible with drupal 5.x and hence we cannot have a minor release that breaks CMS compatibility. We hope to have code checked into trunk soon that will provide drupal 6 support and the community can backport it to 2.0 if needed.

In general, we tend to avoid making any major code changes or code development after a code freeze. Code freeze typically happens a 2-4 weeks before the alpha release. In the past we have been burnt with making code changes late in the release cycle and hence tend to avoid it

lobo

I can probably put a few hours into backporting this to CiviCRM 2.0. I didn't see the 2.0 = 5.x / 2.1 = 6.0 notes in the roadmap until now, and I've already committed to getting Drupal 6 and CiviCRM 2.0 to work together.

Where should I check for status on any work by you guys on this? Would it show up as an improvement in the issue tracker (I don't see anything there now), or a particular file/folder in the svn version? Thanks!

its also a pretty big change and we are taking the opportunity to rewrite the menu/invoke system in civicrm to match drupal 6. as such i dont think a backport is trivial. The project is a bit bigger than i expected and 2.0 has been keeping us busy. It probably wont be in svn for the next couple of weeks.

I respect that maintaining multiple versions of CiviCRM for Drupal is not an easy task. That being said Drupal 6.0 is not ready for prime time for many installations. The lack of contrib module availability is making an upgrade to 6.0 impossible or at least impracticable for most sites. I am not a developer and I don't have the skills to throw my hat in and take on a backwards compatibility project but I think that for sites to reasonably be able to stay up to date with the CiviCRM patches that it is important to not jump the gun on expecting Drupal users to be ready to move to 6.0. Please note this is the first time that a Drupal release has happened and even Drupal.org has not migrated. Though there will be movement in this over the next few months I don't think that I will be ready to migrate all the sites that I work with that use CiviCRM.

Thanks,
Steve

under my best guess scenario, i suspect it will be released in mid-may or so. Most of the times my best guess scenario is off by a month at least :)

I suspect Drupal6 will be ready by that time and most contrib modules will have migrated. If the CiviCRM community would like to maintain Drupal 5 compatibility, then folks need to step up and contribute and make it so. There are lots of ways of contributing, and we need to start getting the community to contribute a bit more in the short term :)

lobo