3mension blog

April has passed, and it’s time to report with an update. At the moment, not much is visible of the progress that has been made thus far, but that’s not a correct view of the situation. I thought I might give an update on where the project is headed, what has been done, and what remains to be done.

My previous post, a long time ago, I elaborated a bit on the difficult choice between ImpressCMS and Xoops. As I read in the ImpressCMS forums, ‘A line is being drawn in the sand’, and these two CMS packages are each going their separate ways, without regard for compatibility between one another. That means one has to make a choice, and recently making that choice became much more difficult due to the evolving nature of the projects.

All is quiet on the ImpressCMS front…

Where ImpressCMS has been showing the best progress right after the split from Xoops, the situation seems to have been reversed. The Xoops website contains some high-profile messages (the return of former key contributors, mergers again with spin-off branches), while the ImpressCMS site is eerily quiet. This might entice people to switch again to Xoops, and I can’t blame them.

I joined the iCMS development team a bit more than a month ago, in order to have Subversion repository access. As an insider, I have seen what is going on in ImpressCMS development. I must say it’s quite strange that Xoops and ImpressCMS are doing the same things, but for their own platform. Xoops has announced that there is a blue movement going on, which aims to rewrite as much modules as possible using the Xoops Foundation classes. 

At the same time, the ImpressCMS 1.2 alpha release is being prepared, and a huge effort has been done to rewrite as much functionality with IPF classes (ImpressCMS Persistable Framework), performing the same functionality as the Xoops Foundation classes. The iCMS developers are ‘Eating their own dogfood’, as they say. The major difference is that there is no site-wide announcement before the first alpha version is delivered, contrary to Xoops.

Frameworks

ImpressCMS defined the IPF (ImpressCMS Persistable Framework) as the basic class structure that would be the foundation for any development.  The IPF still builds on many classes with the ‘Xoops’ name in them, but that will be changed in the future, I’m certain. Once everything is based on the IPF, one can easily change the underlying system internally without breaking everything that is built on top.

 This is all very nice, and good news for the iCMS people, but I’m trying to build a site here. What does that mean for 3mension? Well, the good news is that iCMS will release the first alpha of the 1.2 branch in the following days. That branch is compatible with the imBuilding module, which will make the build process much more straightforward, and much quicker. Developing a module would become possible in a single day, according to people testing it.

The 3mension site will go online in a short while, with the basic functionality available. Most of the community-building addons will not be there yet, but the upload and description will be. In fact, it will be based on a version of wf-downloads. In the meantime, development will continue on the iCMS 1.2 version, where a tailored platform will be created for the 3mension needs.

The near future

I still have lots of work:

• setup the right combination for the wf-download options
• decide on the new look
• find some testers
• look around for community managers (one for each community, which is defined by a specific engine or a 3D tool)
• setup a bug tracking tool that can be used by the tester team.

Much to do, but a lot of the difficult decisions have been taken. Now, all we can do is go forward.