Weekly update for March 8, 2019

[ryan]

Just a quick update this week rather than a blog post. I’ve been continuing to work through the PW issues repo with Netcarver and it seems to be working well, so am planning to just keep working through it till we’ve covered everything there. Thanks to Netcarver and everyone else helping there. When we get the issues repo to the point where it’s pretty empty, I thought we’d then move on to the requests repo and PRs if possible. While there have been several commits to the core this week (mostly related to the issues repo), I don’t think there’s anything major enough to warrant a version bump, so will get another week’s worth of updates in place before bumping it to the next version number. 

This week I’ve been putting the finishing touches on the ProMailer module, getting that ready for release. A copy of ProMailer will be available to current subscribers of the ProDevTools package that want it. A few people have indicated that they’d also like to see it as a product independent of the ProDevTools, and actually I think that makes sense because ProMailer has become a much more comprehensive product than originally planned, and it really needs its own dedicated support board, as well as dedicated dev and agency versions. So I will make those available separately from ProDevTools. If you are a current ProDevTools subscriber and you’d like to get the first version of ProMailer when it is ready, please send me a PM here in the forums indicating that, and I will get a copy to you when it is released in beta. Even if you aren’t a ProDevTools subscriber, but would still like to be notified when ProMailer is available, please send me a PM as well. If all goes well, it should be available by this time next week or earlier. 

Next month we’ll hopefully be back to work on the website here as well, and develop the new modules directory. 

[szabesz]

24 minutes ago, ryan said:

so am planning to just keep working through it till we’ve covered everything there.

I am really happy to hear this! I consider it to be the much needed feature freeze some of us have been waiting for ? 

ProMailer also sounds very promising. Thanks for all the hard work of Ryan and all the other contributors.

[Robin S]

35 minutes ago, ryan said:

I’ve been continuing to work through the PW issues repo with Netcarver and it seems to be working well, so am planning to just keep working through it till we’ve covered everything there. Thanks to Netcarver and everyone else helping there. When we get the issues repo to the point where it’s pretty empty, I thought we’d then move on to the requests repo and PRs if possible.

Awesome, I think that's a great plan. ?

[netcarver]

In addition to Ryan's work in the codebase, I'd like to mention @matjazp, @Robin S and @adrian for their activity in the issue repo! (I know there are others - but these three stand out to me.)

Six weeks ago there were 230+ open issues, we just dipped under 100.

[arjen]

Great works guys! Thanks @netcarver and his "crew" @matjazp @adrian and @Robin S.

[ryan]

Glad you like the updates! Hope I didn't give the wrong impression, as I didn't intend to communicate anything about a "feature freeze" (as was stated in one of the messages above). At least nothing like that was, is, or ever will be planned, except maybe for a few days prior to a master version release. This is a stable project, but not a static one. There is no freezing or thawing, just the flow—I'll try to clarify... 

ProcessWire was originally built out of the needs of web development projects here, and that has always been a significant driver of what and when features are focused on at any point in time. When I add or improve something, it's usually because I'm going to be using it now and always going forward in actual projects, and by extension, can also support it in this project for everyone else. Of course, I only add/improve stuff that I know has significant benefit for all PW users, regardless of whether it's recognized in the short term or not. The other major part is features that arise from needs or contributions in the community here and on GitHub. My client projects are pretty similar to those of most PW users, which is good for the project. I'm always looking for ways to optimize and improve PW and its API, especially things that will save time in my and your projects, and this has always been the case. I'm driven by it. The feature focus is always holistic and never sacrifices backwards compatibility. And the product focus is on long term quality and sustainability, being the best tool for the job, not on being popular. 

The focus may largely be on issue reports right now, but this should not be interpreted to mean anything beyond resolving issue reports. I'm making continuous improvements and additions where appropriate along the way, as always. Perhaps they aren't big enough things to warrant blog posts now, but stay tuned — there is lots of good stuff on the way and currently in development. Every year there are a couple of important periods of good momentum in the issues repo, especially this time around, and so I'd like to continue that as long as possible and hopefully cover everything there. The difference this time is that we've got Netcarver expertly leading the effort as well as intelligently identifying which reports are still relevant. Plus there are a whole lot more "includes suggested fix" reports this time, thanks to people like Toutouwai and many others that know their way around the core extremely well, and often figure out how to resolve issues well before I do. It's a great community collaboration. 

[bernhard]

Thank you Ryan for this information! What about all the open PR's? There are at the moment 50 of them open, some going back to 2016... Could @netcarver maybe also have an eye on them? Or do you prefer that we report feature requests also via the issues repository?

thx ? 

PS: @kongondo recently shared how vscode integrates with pull requests. Don't know how PHPStorm handles this, but maybe VSCode can help checking all those open PRs:

 

[Beluga]

15 hours ago, bernhard said:

What about all the open PR's? There are at the moment 50 of them open, some going back to 2016... Could @netcarver maybe also have an eye on them? Or do you prefer that we report feature requests also via the issues repository?

From Ryan's original post, I understood that PRs and requests would be a collective effort as well ("I thought we’d then move on to the requests repo and PRs if possible").

[bernhard]

11 minutes ago, Beluga said:

From Ryan's original post, I understood that PRs and requests would be a collective effort as well ("I thought we’d then move on to the requests repo and PRs if possible").

Thx, seems I missed that ?