What is Frog doing right now?
As Frog’s release manager, I’d like to give you an idea of where Frog is heading.
Split Frog
In our roadmap, which is mostly up-to-date, we talk about release 0.9.5 as being “Split Frog”. The reason for this is: Frog is currently split in a frontend and backend area for performance reasons. However, this has been causing us more and more problems lately. As such, we want to remove the split.
The main big idea for Frog 0.9.5 was to remove the split and perform bugfixing.
Apart from fixing any problems related to removing the split, we also have a number of other ideas:
- Add a skeleton plugin to core to help out plugin developers. [done]
- Add a translation template generator to help out translators with translating Frog core and plugins. [done]
- Prepare the core with more in-code comments to provide for PHPDoc generated documention. [done]
- Add frontend login. [done]
- Expand the number of events.
- A mechanism for content in multiple languages.
- Provide detailed textual upgrade instructions.
- Bug fixing.
Further afield
There are lots of ideas for the future of Frog. Here’s a number of them:
We need to check that we have complete end-to-end UTF-8 support. Frog is already good at languages, but lets make sure we have covered everything.
We would like to expand and improve upon the plugin API to give plugin developers more tools to mess about with Frog. Part of this will be a consistent set of events. Another part of this will be to allow for expanding on certain core functionalities. An example would be OpenID support through the plugin API.
Another serious idea is to allow for (semi) automated upgrades and (semi) automated plugin installations.
Conclusion
The current main drive and focus for Frog is to fix bugs and remove the frontend / backend split. Once that is done, we will be able to start working towards a 1.0 release for Frog.
I hope this post has given you a reasonable idea of the things that are going on with the Frog core system. Apart from all this, things are lively on the user contributed plugins side so lots going on there too!
If you want to keep track of the goings-on in Frog, there are a couple of good resources:
Yours sincerely,
Martijn van der Kleijn,
Frog release manager
