Folks,
We're building our plans for the next milestone release of FarCry. This should be considered a work in progress and has not been finalised. I put this out to the community to really get some feedback on what people are eager to see and spark some discussion about the priorities we need to give to various areas of the code base.
************************************** * FarCry 2.4 is codenamed "Glamour" * **************************************
--/ Mission Statement /-- *Glamour* is all about the users. We must overhaul the UI of FarCry administration, and surface as much hidden functionality as possible. FarCry will become an elegant and beautiful thing to behold.
--/ Reality Check /-- Although the FarCry administration interfaces are generally good and maintain a particular look and feel across all interfaces they are not ideal. There are many features that exist under the hood that are really only acessible to power users of the system -- and by that we mean developers who have an intimate understanding of the core. This will be changed.
FarCry provides for sophisticated content management scenarios. We need to provide more intuitive interfaces for non-technical authors to get the most from the system. On the flip-side we need to somehow accommodate the least experienced users in our community and more easily allow admins to "dumb down" the admin interfaces.
A rough list of desired outcomes includes:
** Overhaul of UI - work to a single set of CSS styles to allow for complete admin customisations - standardise all FORMs and wizards to admin styles - introduce Crystal SVG icon library throughout - Standardise on cross browser support for Safari, Firefox, Mozilla and IE - improve rich text editor integration for popular editors (refactor editor integration to make this easier for developers wanting to plugin in new editors) - improve media management of files and images for all content types (including custom types)
** Functional Changes to Core - add basic image manipulations (eg. auto thumb generation) - add file archiving - add generic interface for container reflection - add generic admin interfaces for ALL core content types (including tree content types) - replace the SECURITY interfaces completely (include profile management, and multi directory management options) - statistics aggregation and purging options - updates to FriendlyURL servlet
** Architecture Changes - integrate FourQ package directly into the Core code base - extend FourQ array properties to include data beyond object references - improve error handling options (including URL 404 and developer debugging)
** Installation - new installer to make life easier for new members to the community - more comprehensive sample site templates to show off more functionality and give better guidance - out of the box support for context roots - J2EE deployment options for CF7 installations
--/ Rough TimeLines /-- We are aiming for a beta release of the *Glamour* code base for end of May 2005, with a final production release end of June 2005. This is ambitious and we're going to need help from the community to achieve this.
--/ System Requirements /-- We've decided to hold off any CF7 specific enhancements in core for the *Glamour* release. However, CF7 features and functionality can certainly be leveraged in FarCry projects and extensions.
It's envisaged that *Glamour* will be the final milestone release for CFMX 6.1. Future releases will be targetted to take specific advantage of the CF7 platform in the farcry_core code base. The next milestone version after 2.4 will be version 3.0 -- the change in primary version number denoting a backward compatability issue associated with the requirement for CF7.
Note: Complete compatability with CF7 was a fundamental requirement of the 2.3 milestone release. Any incompatabilities are considered bugs and will be patched to the 2.3 maintenance branch in addition to the HEAD trunk.
Best regards,
-- geoff http://www.daemon.com.au/
Geoff,
It sounds like a lot of great enhancements are planned for 2.4. Congrats to you and the entire FarCry community - especially for such an ambitious timeline!
I have a couple of suggestions I would like to get make for a future FarCry release. Perhaps some of them could be worked into 2.4, while I suspect others would have to wait for 3.0+. Most of them are code/architecture related as opposed to functional in nature, and reflect my opinion only. I appreciate all of the thought and effort that has gone into FarCry thus far and only want to make suggestions to strengthen it as a platform.
+ Review the code to ensure that all CFC methods are fully tagged. By this, I mean that all relevant attributes such as Access, returnType, Hint, etc. are used consistently. I would be willing to help out with this effort.
+ I would love to see more encapsulation in the FarCry CFCs. By this I mean refactoring the code such that application and session scoped variables aren't referenced directly inside of CFC methods, but are instead passed in as arguments. This will take some doing, and probably won't make sense until there are unit tests developed for FarCry.
+ Drop the mixing of tags and cfscript within CFCs. We've coded several of our applications over the last year or so this way too, and are now finding that as we try to build tools to help us automate certain tasks (in CFEclipse), having to parse CFCs that have both tags and cfscript blocks in the same methods is a bit problematic. While some of our developers prefer the cfscript style syntax, the reality is that Macromedia has basically said that there won't be further enhancements to cfscript (in any meaningful way). Because of that, I think it makes sense to try to keep the coding style in FarCry CFCs consistent and make use of tags over cfscript.
-Rob
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