Short term release plan
Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2022 4:01 pm
Hi
I wanted to share my plan for coming releases. This is just meant as a foundation - to cover what really needs to be done. If there are additional ideas, that would be great. Meaning: If someone wants to develop something for these releases, please just coordinate on Github or here and do so! :)
We need to make a new release soonish, a 2.4.1. Especially the serendipity_plugin_comments bug needs to be fixed in a release, but there are other needed fixes, as the report that in some specific installations PHP warnings do not get hidden all the time (which works in many other installations), the non-working Spartacus downloads of viewtopic.php?t=25672 and it seems like the importers are broken, viewtopic.php?t=25713.
That release can't be done now, as not all fixes are there yet, but it would be good not to wait too long.
Following this, there will be a need for a release covering PHP 8.1 and 8.2. More by chance 2.4.0 seems to be already compatible with PHP 8.1, apart from the strftime removal, https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/issues/784, which produces only warnings so far. For both those versions, the core, themes and important plugins need to be tested again.
:!: PHP 8.0 as main version currently gives us a timeline: We have until Nov 2023 to release a new stable supporting at least PHP 8.1. :!:
Apart from PHP: There was a big smarty upgrade which we really should add to that release, as it is supposed to give proper PHP 8 support (maybe making some of our template workarounds unnecessary?). Other bundled libs should be updated as well.
Vague ideas to go beyond the minimum that are in my head and someone could pick up:
1. The fediverse thing got a big boost because of Twitters downfall. Adding parts of that world could be worth it now, like webmentions (despite my misgivings about their bad spec)
2. Adding a better WYSIWYG editor could be a worthwhile project, at the beginning as just an alternative. There are some nice projects out there with markdown support for example.
3. The importer bug highlights the need of unit tests for imports, which is quite a bit of legwork, but not all that complicated probably
4. I feel like there is a lot of value in our old themes. Some are seriously nice, others nice in a retro way, very little is junk. That is why I invested quite some time trying to make all of them not fail, but they deserve a second pass, making all of them work properly with serendipity (modernizing their output where needed while preserving their design ideas).
5. It would be time to revisit the caching layer. It is currently provided by voku/simple-cache, a project which seems abandoned. Also, I never got around to show the main advantage of such a modular layer, combining Serendipity with Redis as cache. To measure the effect and document how to do it would be great, with a new caching lib.
I wanted to share my plan for coming releases. This is just meant as a foundation - to cover what really needs to be done. If there are additional ideas, that would be great. Meaning: If someone wants to develop something for these releases, please just coordinate on Github or here and do so! :)
We need to make a new release soonish, a 2.4.1. Especially the serendipity_plugin_comments bug needs to be fixed in a release, but there are other needed fixes, as the report that in some specific installations PHP warnings do not get hidden all the time (which works in many other installations), the non-working Spartacus downloads of viewtopic.php?t=25672 and it seems like the importers are broken, viewtopic.php?t=25713.
That release can't be done now, as not all fixes are there yet, but it would be good not to wait too long.
Following this, there will be a need for a release covering PHP 8.1 and 8.2. More by chance 2.4.0 seems to be already compatible with PHP 8.1, apart from the strftime removal, https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/issues/784, which produces only warnings so far. For both those versions, the core, themes and important plugins need to be tested again.
:!: PHP 8.0 as main version currently gives us a timeline: We have until Nov 2023 to release a new stable supporting at least PHP 8.1. :!:
Apart from PHP: There was a big smarty upgrade which we really should add to that release, as it is supposed to give proper PHP 8 support (maybe making some of our template workarounds unnecessary?). Other bundled libs should be updated as well.
Vague ideas to go beyond the minimum that are in my head and someone could pick up:
1. The fediverse thing got a big boost because of Twitters downfall. Adding parts of that world could be worth it now, like webmentions (despite my misgivings about their bad spec)
2. Adding a better WYSIWYG editor could be a worthwhile project, at the beginning as just an alternative. There are some nice projects out there with markdown support for example.
3. The importer bug highlights the need of unit tests for imports, which is quite a bit of legwork, but not all that complicated probably
4. I feel like there is a lot of value in our old themes. Some are seriously nice, others nice in a retro way, very little is junk. That is why I invested quite some time trying to make all of them not fail, but they deserve a second pass, making all of them work properly with serendipity (modernizing their output where needed while preserving their design ideas).
5. It would be time to revisit the caching layer. It is currently provided by voku/simple-cache, a project which seems abandoned. Also, I never got around to show the main advantage of such a modular layer, combining Serendipity with Redis as cache. To measure the effect and document how to do it would be great, with a new caching lib.