what's next?

[Jeffrey McManus]

Hi everybody,

Now that we've had our first open-source release I wanted to post some
quick thoughts on the things I expect to be working on over the course
of the next month. (Ideally I'd like to do new Tinypug code drops/
releases every 2-3 weeks until we either take over the world or drop
dead from exhaustion, so that puts our next release, which we'll call
0.9.2, in the early May timeframe).

1) Bugs. There are a few bugs in the issue tracker (which btw is
located at http://code.google.com/p/tinypug/issues/list). If you're a
motivated coder and you want to knock one of these out, it might be a
good way to learn how this stuff works (and we stand ready to help --
if you're not sure how to get started, just ask).

If you're non-motivated or a non-coder and you want to help with bugs,
then *finding* bugs might be the easiest way to contribute. To that
end I'd recommend using the Tinypug demo site located at
opensourcecms.com (the direct link to our page there is
http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/details.php?scriptid=295&name=Tinypug).

2) More flexible permissions. Today our permissions system is pretty
rigid, so I've sketched out a fairly thorough way to do user-defined
permissions and started implementing it over the weekend. It's my goal
to have this integrated by the 0.9.2 release. This will give you the
ability to shut off features of the system entirely for different
classes of users, enable civilian users to do stuff like view survey
results and create forums, and create custom roles that have
permissions somewhere in between what we permit normal users and
admins to do today. There is a lot to do here (since every call we
make will need to adhere to the new permission system), but most of
the complex stuff is already done.

3) More flexible content options. This is the idea of user-defined
content types that lots of other content systems have. Very powerful
but pretty complicated to do right. I haven't even started planning
this yet but I'd like to see it happen sooner rather than later. Ideas
and suggestions are welcome.

4) Better output visualization from surveys. Right now we do a big
long page of bar graphs. Other types of graphs as well as the ability
to do merge analysis (how many women answered yes to this question?)
would be cool. I am operating under the assumption that better data
visualization would give certain types of potential users quicker "ah-
ha" moments with what we're trying to do.

There are a bunch of other ideas on the drawing board but I think
these are the biggies for the May release.

What are your priorities? Feel free to post here (or log it in the
issue tracker) and let's discuss.

Cheers,

Jeffrey