Archipelago Release 1.1.0 starts today (soft announcement)

[dp...@metro.org]

Hello dearest community,

First: I have to apologize for the silence In/on this realm. I could blame Slack or Github or the amount of code we have been developing non-stop, the weather, my mood, new hobbies (none) or new partner implementations or even twig templating, but to be honest it is just on me. Sorry. I will try to make more public announcements and community sharing through this channel.

Now to the real message. Many of you have been already running Archipelago 1.1.0 Github branches for a while and might already know or experienced some of the new amazing (and other so subtle that you will never know they exist) features that we have been developing for this last year. Some of you not yet. And some of you are probably totally new to this community (ciao!), our architecture, ways and concepts. Our releases tend to be a more human (inclined) involved process (I might say not only cold/code/byte/diff/patch/merge) where conversations, questioning, experience using the code and features, real mass data experiences, dev-ops, performance and configuration (site building), even theming, all come together entangled for months to make sure you get a system, a platform. Not just code. This also means it takes more time than just merging, tagging and moving forward. 

1.1.0 is now stable enough to move into the final phase of the release (thus this message) which means today I will start wrapping up all 6 Strawberry module branches (there is a new one). This means also no more code related to featues, tagging and pre-releasing in GitHub will happen, followed (overlapped with care) by Allison, who will do site building/templating on a public facing system that runs the new code and Containers (new Solr, etc) to make sure the deployments docker-compose ensembles you will get have the very best of our templates, configurations, Solr configs, Views, displays and even eye some candy. A way of sharing also our experience running Archipelago. I will add to those some demos of new features (IIIF Viewer interactions, Advanced search, aggregation, etc) and some theming and adjustments.  This part of the process takes probably 2-3 days more and you will see tons of Github direct pushes/changes and notifications.

Next week, Monday I will announce the Code Release with a thorough list of changes, fixes, new features and also of course Known Issues (the actual release notes) and we expect to be able to share with you all by Wednesday a public facing system (showcase), the new archipelago-deployment  and archipelago-deployment-live repositories. From there we will keep branches open for a week in case someone finds a breaking change/big bug (we do not deprecate, we don't leave anyone behind, no worries) that could merit more coffee and longer days of fixing. We would love to have a community call show/tell/hear so you can experience first hand what is new, how things work and what to expect coming forward. Then the branches are closed and 1.2.0 starts. 

1.1.0 Is the last pure Drupal 9.5+ release. 1.2.0 will be Drupal 10 and 9 Hybrid. 1.3 only Drupal 10. Why not Drupal 10 yet? It is really not stable enough for our needs. We don't believe in moving forward/updating just because there is a newer thing. Repositories are serious business even if I (can't speak for the rest of the team) am not. (PS: thanks to everyone specially our closest co-workers and internal team. Thanks to those who care/break/ask/propose/question/read)

For now that is all (see, no cheesy messages today!). We will keep you all updated and hope you like the actual announcement we have prepared for Monday!

have a great and long life, weekend, sleep and dreams,  calmer summer/winter vibes (until Monday)

Regards

Diego Pino Navarro

METRO.org