One big problem with current activeCollab development process is that its pretty much closed. Community was just a spectator most of the time. That is about to change, because I know the importance of active community that is involved in every aspect of project development. So, here are the goals of activeCollab 0.8:

• Framework will be extracted. During the extraction process I’ll put a lot of attention on API documentation, tests and performance.
• Full API. It will be foundation for building rich interface and for providing data to plugins.
• Plugin support will be introduced with full documentation for plugin developers. Also, activeCollab will handle common task like providing search, comments, file attachments, email notifications and similar task for developers. They should concentrate on fun stuff – building their plugins, not the plumbing.
• Markup and design guidelines. It is really important to provide consistent interface that does not look like it was patched together by 700 developers. Few interface designers approached me and offered to help with the interface so we’ll work on many design and usability improvements. At the same time we’ll produce official recommendations, sets of markup elements, styles and widgets that plugin developers will be able to use to easily fit their solutions in overall look and feel of application and ensure that things look as expected even when theme is changed.
• We’ll provide official repository for plugins, themes and translations.

As you can see, there is a lot of things that are planned for 0.8. Most important goal of this changes is to finally get people involved in development process – core developers, plugin developers, interface designers, integrations… We’ll provide you with tools and resources and see what all of us together can make! As Mike said: lets put collab into activeCollab!

activeCollab 0.7 is pretty important version because it brings many bug fixes and some nice new features (I still need to sit and write detailed release notes). There are some known problems with activeCollab 0.6 and I tried to fix most of them. It is not yet finished but we need to test it on more than two machines I generally use for testing.

Important notes, please read before you download and install this version:

• There is no upgrade script and it is not an easy job to transfer existing data to a new system. Wait for a full 0.7 to be able to upgrade.
• Mailing will not work unless you provide a valid SMTP server. Check out this ticket for details.
• All you IIS users - please test the installer and file upload. There are some major problems with activeCollab 0.6 and file uploading when installed on IIS so we should get this one right this time
• Go through language files and check the spelling. My English is still not good
• Known problems with installation on MySQL versions older than 4.1.

Download:

• .zip (680kb)
• .tar.gz (420kb)

If you find any problems report them on activeCollab forum.

activeCollab 0.6 was a really easy to produce because it was a bugfix release. No new stuff there, just a lot of fixed problems that made people go crazy when alpha1 was introduced. 0.7 is a whole different story. There is already a user base that want an easy upgrade without data loss, it has some new tools in the system and many of existing ones are improved, it is more “future friendly” (user can see what version is installed, when new version is available administrator will get a small reminder etc), it will let users install aC even when installer breaks and stuff like that. Really nice set of changes in my opinion.

One more important thing that most users don’t know about 0.7 is that 0.7 will be a release that will stick around for at least two months without any major update. Critical bugs will be fixed and released, but that's all. Because of that 0.7 need to be solid and feature complete.

So, here is the list of things that need to be done before we roll out activeCollab 0.7. Some of them are easy, some are already fixed (just need to be tested), other are not so easy or they are simple but really time consuming (building an upgrade script for instance). Use that list as a progress indicator, not dates.

And the most limiting factor in the whole story: time. Things get really interesting when you have only one person who is supporting the project, building a new version and trying to make a living at the same time. I’m not saying that I’m not loving it, I really enjoy working on activeCollab… Its is so fun! I’m just saying that I’m not as fast as 10 – 50 people software company.

In order to make the development process more transparent and to let you know why I'm saying what I'm saying most of the time (“Not now” and “Its currently out of the scope” to some feature requests, “No” to some early integration proposals, “Yes” to more work on system level instead of feature lists etc) let me define goal of activeCollab project. Its rather simple:

When I say high quality I mean:

• Active and open community that is not afraid to share and help
• Consistent and easy to use interface
• System that is easy to install and upgrade without data loss
• Flexible platform that can be extended to fit specific user needs
• Well designed, tested and flexible code that uses best programming practices
• Solid API that will let other products and services be easily integrated with activeCollab
• Up-to-date development and user documentation
• Commercial services for companies and users who need warranty and reliability
• Sustainable business model so we can guaranty our users that we'll be here in two or five years from now

Did I missed something?

That brings us to one really important thing that we need to make clear. If your contribution brings us closer to that goal then it will be welcomed, but if it does not serve that goal and distract us from reaching it then we don't need it.

How to get involved? You can contribute by making a code contribution, suggestion, bug report, feature request, you can help us with the design, provide us some resources or donate money. There is a lot of ways to help, but please lets not get distracted. Every move we take should brings us closer to high quality collaboration platform that is open, free, easy to set up and use and that make life of the users easier.

Please comment. I'd really like to know what the community thinks about this.

While we are all waiting for 0.7 lets have a little chat. I'd really like to meet you all, learn more about you and how you are using activeCollab if you use is already, what features you use the most, what you miss… Stuff like that.

So, here are some questions, in no particular order…

• Introduce yourself. Who are you? Where are you from?
• How are you using activeCollab? Does it help?
• How did you heard about activeCollab?
• What are the features that you find most useful in current versions? What are the things that you find missing?
• Anything else?

As I said, no particular order. You don't even need to answer to all of them ;)