Timeline for 4.7

tldr

• July: Open development. Major initiatives may still be accepted for 4.7 if significant implementation work has been done.
• August: Feature freeze.  Existing 4.7 initiatives should be mostly done, but there may still be some work on development/maturation/gaps/loose-ends. Bug fixes encouraged. New (minor) enhancements may be accepted, but this will grow stricter as the month progresses.
• September: Stabilization. 2 or 3 alphas. Mostly bug fixes. Split off 4.7 from master.

Discussion

CiviCRM is community open-source, heavily influenced by the participation of partners and users. Twice each year, we gather for week long sprints to plan and develop. The April sprint in Colorado produced a number of great initiatives, and a major factor was the alignment with the release: 4.6.0 was out; the roadmap for 4.7 was as clear as the Rocky Mountain sky; and we could focus on new initiatives without loose-ends to distract us. It was fun. To create the same dynamic for the October sprints, we'll need to wrap up the current initiatives beforehand.

Looking through the on-going intiatives being developed by active contributors and the core team, there's still a lot of work to be done for 4.7. Here's an incomplete list of the larger initiatives:

• Payment processing refactor
• ACLs for financial types
• Status messages / reports
• Dynamic settings UI; settings cleanup
• Payment and Order APIs
• JS upgrades
• Webform / IPN
• Scheduled reminder - hookable models
• Simplified API connections
• Security audit
• Migration of User/Admin docs
• Website redesign

Most of these initiatives have made substantial progress since April, but we need to finish them.

Cuts and Edits

A couple initiatives were conceived for the 4.7 cycle but don’t appear feasible. A few words about them:

• Installer Rewrite: This will get pushed to the next cycle. Hopefully, we can renew this one during the fall sprints.
• Form Builder POC: Coleman and I had hoped to spend 150-200 hours on a broad proof-of-concept form-builder (encompassing multiple components), but it won’t fit in this cycle. So we’re attacking this problem from another angle - the dynamic settings UI has a lot of overlap with the form-builder (using APIs and JSON metadata to construct the UI), and we’ll spend an extra 50-80 hours making components from the dynamic-settings UI more robust. In the next cycle, we can build on them to make a broad POC.

(Update) Joe Murray pointed out over IRC that the list of on-going initiatives was missing a few cool ones, so I've added them. There appears to be some technical difficulty with the spam filtering on the blog's comments.  If there are other issues/comments, please ping totten on IRC or email (@civicrm.org).

(Update) Comments should be working again.