Hi all, since the 1.0 release we've seen contributions to the framework grow rapidly and functional areas expand to provide an extremely rich and powerful toolset. This has been both a blessing and something of a challenge for us here at Zend- a blessing because we have so many great contributors helping us bring value to all ZF users and a challenge because Zend has committed itself from the outset to support every component in the framework. As we have begun to build out our support solution, the ZF team has found itself in the difficult position of selecting proposals for core inclusion based not only on their added value to the framework but also the 'supportability' of these components going forward. With the current proposal process our only recourse for proposals that hold lots of potential but could not reasonably be supported by Zend is to approve them for laboratory, which has proven to be a sort of limbo as we do not provide any distribution mechanism for laboratory beyond SVN and the quality/completeness of any laboratory code is not guaranteed. These factors make components in laboratory a questionable proposition at best for the majority of framework users. Our proposed solution is to introduce two new concepts with the 1.5 release: 'extras' and 'extras incubator'. The distinction between components chosen for core incubator and those chosen for extras incubator is simple: Zend will provide support for components in core- but not extras- while providing distribution for both core and extras on the main ZF site and possibly in other Zend software distributions such as Zend Core. The strict guidelines for quality that we have enforced for core components, such as test code coverage and documentation, would also apply to components in extras. The exact form of packaging is up for some discussion, but we'd like to keep one package that is lean and mean containing only core components. In any case, extras will be offered on the main download page for ZF and may even be distributable via the command line for 1.5. Almost all components that are currently in core would remain in core. There are a few web services that we would like to move to extras: Audioscrobbler, Simpy, delicious, and Flickr. It should be noted that components may move from extras to core at a later date and vice versa. There will be no well-defined criteria for which components belong in core and which belong in extras beyond Zend's ability to support them, but size of user base, amount of support effort (very high for interfaces to other large systems such as database adapters and web services), and all around value add to ZF users will be considered. It should also be noted that this would not necessarily be our final solution for non-core components; it is designed to give proposal authors a better option for their components in the short- to medium-term. If there are no major objections, we will update the proposal process documents and begin approving laboratory components and new proposals for extras incubator shortly after the 1.5 preview release. Please respond with any questions or comments- this is a decision we have to come to as a community. :)
,Wil
