When is 3.0 ready for GA?

For what I see right now there is no community. In any case there is no communication from the official team for a long time now ='(
So it may not be a fork but just the continuity in another structure =)

Hi,
jaric, maswak, gus, as you seem to be well informed, do you have any intel about the new coming version ? any open beta ?
Don't tell me dmartin was right saying that the project is dead, please ='(

Hi Astik and the rest of you,

Sorry it's been so long since you heard from me. I have been very quiet lately in the community much because family life took off and my child is more fun than infoglue (imagine that).
So the time I spend on Infoglue these days are spent on coding and not the community. Partly because I really want 3.0 to get finished and partly because I among others consider the community in the current form almost dead.

Having said that I want to assure all of you that the 3.0 version is closing in and is getting pretty good but since Modul1 has seized it's involvement I'm the only one currently working on it as far as I know. When it comes to release and community I'm considering a few alternatives. Either we try a restart of the community with more volounteers or we drive the platform in another form. Any thoughts on this? Would anyone be interested in participating if we form a new organisation? I will continue to develop the platform anyhow but if I don't get help in the community / code-work I will not keep running it in that form as it's to time consuming to both do the coding and be active maintainer of the community.

What we need to be able to work towards a valid community:
1. 2-3 Information managers (people who keep the website up2date, answer questions on forums, register infoglue on index sites, writing about IG on other sites etc).
2. Configuration manager (resposible for a maven/subversion setup for example)
3. 1-2 GUI-developers (javascript, html, css)
4. 1 Designer
5. 3-x ACTIVE core developers
6. A steering committé of 4-5 persons

I'm doing a review of almost all the java-oss-cms:es on the market now and the sad/good thing is that I however biased I may be I must state that most of the others are way behind infoglue when it comes to enterprise scale wcm. The thing we lack is the community and that is party my fault not being able to attract people to the project. Another thing is that almost all the competitors we have in the java-field are not volunteer-based open communities anymore but are nowdays driven like product companies but with dual license-options. Look for example at magnolia, liferay, opencms, dotCMS, jahia, exo just to name a few. Perhaps we should take that as a hint and stop kidding ourself in that volunteers will save the day.

As you understand I'm in a process of deciding which way to take and all input from you guys who still visit the community will be helpful.

Best Regards
Mattias Bogeblad, Lead architect Infoglue

Really glad to hear from you !

As you can imagine, I'm in !
I'd be interested in point 2,3 and 5.
I'll keep answering on forum of course.

Great - thanks for the quick reply. I'll apprechiate the input and I'll keep you in mind as soon as we get a preview together.
If you keep responding to user questions and see questions about the future I would apprechiate it if you use my statement as reference.

Best Regards
Mattias Bogeblad

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 01/12/2010 23:20:41

Hello!

Welcome to the new forum Mattias, nice to see your post.

Since this topic is a bit sensitive atm, my post wont be as long as i would like it to be. Hopefully some important details will be revealed soon enough so the discussion can be about the actual software and not the politics around it.

I agree in Mattias suggestions on what needs to be done.
I think that the best strategy to get things going is to start by getting component contributions. As i understand it , most of our components are custom made for our own installation of infoglue, so the chance my component will work on a generic installation is quite slim. I would in any case like a resource site, where we just fork up as much components as we can spare and see what we get. The author of the component do not have to be accountable if it does not work straight away. When the person that downloaded this component gets it to work, he/or she can then post that version etc... This might need some kind of standard on how we package our components.

I think the community have stopped in its tracks because there is nothing new to talk about and if there is, it often feel hopeless since most of the sollutions are custom made for a specific installation. If we start to share our components at a higher rate i think our systems will start resemble eachothers much faster.

But like i said in the beginning, i might need to modify my opinions regarding this depending what actions the major actors will take in the near future.

Hi bogeblad!

It's very great to hear from you, and thank you for a very informative and open message. Here are my somewhat late comments.

bogeblad wrote:Partly because I really want 3.0 to get finished and partly because I among others consider the community in the current form almost dead.

That's always scary to hear from the main developer

bogeblad wrote:Having said that I want to assure all of you that the 3.0 version is closing in and is getting pretty good but since Modul1 has seized it's involvement I'm the only one currently working on it as far as I know.

Are you the only one checking in code to 3.0? since how long? I've gotten the impression that they claim to be working on 3.0. This would be good to clear up.

bogeblad wrote:Would anyone be interested in participating if we form a new organisation?

I will risk my neck a little and say that we are at least considering filling some of the roles you have proposed.

I have some questions, though:

1. Are you willing to share the role of code/commit approver? I.e. can you accept that code is checked into the main branch of IG without your explicit knowledge?
2. Would you consider moving to git for source control?
3. How do you see Modul1's role in the community in the future?
4. Do you run infoglue.org?
5. Would you consider getting the community work going by allowing some trusted users in as admins on infoglue.org (as the site is sadly outdated)?

Hi all,

We are also interested on working on maintaining alive infoglue. We think it is good product and as Mattias said, at large scale sites probably one of the best. About the community and joining to the project I think this thread it is not the best place to gather more people. It could be quite more suitable to update the infoglue web site with some information and, at least, a link to this forum/thread. This discussion it is buried on a offsite forum not much visible even for infoglue users.

Carlos
Public University of Navarra

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 07/12/2010 11:22:22

@Carlos, I agree that information about this should be placed on the website, but I think we're caught in something of a catch-22: who should edit the website when bogeblad is the only one with access and he has stated that he won't do community work until more people are on board? This forum is currently the only place we have we're we can collaborate. And it's not actually offsite, although it is only linked from one IG page (http://infoglue.org/News/News_detail/?contentId=13432), as far as I know...

It's great to hear that you're interested in working on this project, too!

Hello,

Sorry for the late answer !

Infoglue is running as the official CMS at the Lille 1 university for more than 3 years now. About 20 web sites have been designed on Infoglue. Our team is also an active member of the esup-portail consortium (http://www.esup-portail.org). We have selected infoglue to optimize investment on technologies.

We cannot imagine that the Infoglue development stops in the upcoming years. We cannot put a lot of effort on the development tasks, but we're ready to offer our contribution.

On the infoglue side, we can only develop parts of the code that we are obliged to adapt to our own needs.
After a short meeting of our web team, we identify a few major points that require to be improved :
- connection to postgresql database instead of mysql db !
- infoglue used as back office for our institutional portal (Jasig uPortal) [ex : rss feeder or small web sites with access control ]
- usage of attached documents on a webdav repository (through an extension of the FCKEditor) with access control
- user and group right management consistent with our institutional portal (required by the two last points)
- French localization
- some improvements in the access rights
- better handling in mail sending with publications

Apart the first point which requires a lot of work out of our scope, we propose to help the infoglue community by developing / sharing codes on the the others points.
This implies that the requirements can be discussed and validated by an infoglue community.

Best regards

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 14/12/2010 13:22:23

Hi all,
We are a group working at the University of the Baleric Islands (SPAIN) and we would be also interested on working and maintaining alive IG, as our main site, and many others, are already running IG. Just some numbers to clarify:
.- 70+ Repositories/multilanguage sites
.- 4.900+ Sitenodes
.- 55.000+ Contents
.- 31.000+ DigitalAssets
.- 50+ Editors
Running on a Linux SUSE+Tomcat and the DB as an Oracle RAC 11gR2.

In order to do that, some of the things we had to do were:
.- Spanish and Catalan localization
.- Adding the capability to have different templates on each stage (working,live) as properties of the site.
.- Good quality thumbnail generation (PNGs with transparency)
.- Publication control per site, so the buttons to (un)publish are displayed just if the user has the required roles
.- Bulk upload of documents/images though a web form that automatically creates the individual content objects required for each file.
.- Generation of language-aware URLs (adding the language automatically as part of the URL)
.- A filter to access directly the digitalAssets even when they are not linked from any given content (needed to provide direct URLs to downloads, direct access to images...)
.- Modifications to the publishing workflow and the caching sistem (in SelectiveLivePublication mode)
.- Added new functionalities as JSR168 compliant Portal (taking into account PortletModes and per-portlet-instance preferences managent)
.- Plenty of bug fixing

That means we run a moderately modified version of IG running, as our previous attempts to contribute back some of our work/fixes/improvements just seemed to go pipe to /dev/null

. I have to admit that this situation had us a bit worried regarding the upcoming? 3 version as we were facing the lose-lose choice between re-implementing all of our changes again in the new codebase or keep our own codebase based on version 2. None of them really appealing.

That's also we are happy to see something done about the community and we would probably voluntteer on points number 2 & 5 (GUI and core development) as that's where our main expertise lays.

We also agree that IG seems to be, for good or bad, quite unique in the CMS market and in part that's why we chose it. I'm not sure how the dual licensing would work in this case as it has its own set of drawbacks, depending on how you apply that. OpenCMS, for example, has the commercial part "just" as extensions to the core, because dual-licensing the core is tricky bussiness if you want to keep a really open community alive. Not that it cannot be done, but it needs to be carefully planned and executed and it will require a company behind.
But that's not a problem just for IG, almost all open source projects that cross the "enterprise" boundaries need to face that decission sooner or later. The more sucessful, the sooner

.

Anyway, we just wanted to say that we are commited to IG and that we'd like to help it move forward., so that would be it for now.
S!

PD: Congrats on your kid, Mathias, mine is 20 months in 2 days so I know the kind of fun you are talking about

.

We started to use Infoglue for large scale installations in the end of 2009. The message we got when we contacted Mattias and the others was that there was no indication of these upcoming problems. We developed a setup of 240 sites in 127 languages and it has become huge. The reason why we chose Infoglue was simply that it was and still is the absolutely best large-scale CMS on the market. We also looked at the commercial ones and Infoglue could definitively compare itself with the best ones and the architecture of it is more promising than any we have seen.

We are definitively interested to contribute. Especially to protect our investment.

We see one weak side with Infoglue and that is the administrative user gui. I guess we could contribute to make it more ajax/javascript and less page oriented. Additionally, we could contribute with the design of the architecture. If that goes well, we might set off one or two more programmers.

We need further directions how to go on from here!

There is no way to see Infoglue dead in any means!

Stefan

Hi Rasmus,

I think you are right about the great addition a public component-repository would be. I have had the idea several times and the www.infoglue.org contains some components to present components/sites etc.
The 3.0-version contains a new plugin-architecture also which allows one to add MVC-based logic to the cms and custom model-classes to the components. This allows for better, more generic and possibly more advanced modules.
I would propose that someone investigate where and how reusable items should be stored. I'm leaning towards a VCS and I also think we should add a GUI in the CMS called marketplace or similar.
As I said - I would like more contributors - anyone who wants to take this task? I would rate it both fun and advanced but that's just me

. I can help with tips and hints and some review of proposed solution.

For all who are interested I'm soon putting up a RC-version somewhere - please mail me if you want an account (mattias.bogeblad at googles mail service).

Regards
Mattias Bogeblad

Rasmus wrote:Hello!

Welcome to the new forum Mattias, nice to see your post.

Since this topic is a bit sensitive atm, my post wont be as long as i would like it to be. Hopefully some important details will be revealed soon enough so the discussion can be about the actual software and not the politics around it.

I agree in Mattias suggestions on what needs to be done.
I think that the best strategy to get things going is to start by getting component contributions. As i understand it , most of our components are custom made for our own installation of infoglue, so the chance my component will work on a generic installation is quite slim. I would in any case like a resource site, where we just fork up as much components as we can spare and see what we get. The author of the component do not have to be accountable if it does not work straight away. When the person that downloaded this component gets it to work, he/or she can then post that version etc... This might need some kind of standard on how we package our components.

I think the community have stopped in its tracks because there is nothing new to talk about and if there is, it often feel hopeless since most of the sollutions are custom made for a specific installation. If we start to share our components at a higher rate i think our systems will start resemble eachothers much faster.

But like i said in the beginning, i might need to modify my opinions regarding this depending what actions the major actors will take in the near future.

Hi Peter,

1. Are you willing to share the role of code/commit approver? I.e. can you accept that code is checked into the main branch of IG without your explicit knowledge?
YES - especially if #2!

2. Would you consider moving to git for source control?
YES - in the process actually - any input on which hosting service we should use?

3. How do you see Modul1's role in the community in the future?
No idea.

4. Do you run infoglue.org?
Yes - but I probably want others to help depending on my decisions ahead.

5. Would you consider getting the community work going by allowing some trusted users in as admins on infoglue.org (as the site is sadly outdated)?
No problem - i'll be glad to hand some accounts out.

Regards
Mattias Bogeblad

jaric wrote:Hi bogeblad!

It's very great to hear from you, and thank you for a very informative and open message. Here are my somewhat late comments.

bogeblad wrote:Partly because I really want 3.0 to get finished and partly because I among others consider the community in the current form almost dead.

That's always scary to hear from the main developer

bogeblad wrote:Having said that I want to assure all of you that the 3.0 version is closing in and is getting pretty good but since Modul1 has seized it's involvement I'm the only one currently working on it as far as I know.

Are you the only one checking in code to 3.0? since how long? I've gotten the impression that they claim to be working on 3.0. This would be good to clear up.

bogeblad wrote:Would anyone be interested in participating if we form a new organisation?

I will risk my neck a little and say that we are at least considering filling some of the roles you have proposed.

I have some questions, though:

1. Are you willing to share the role of code/commit approver? I.e. can you accept that code is checked into the main branch of IG without your explicit knowledge?
2. Would you consider moving to git for source control?
3. How do you see Modul1's role in the community in the future?
4. Do you run infoglue.org?
5. Would you consider getting the community work going by allowing some trusted users in as admins on infoglue.org (as the site is sadly outdated)?

Hi Carlos,

Sure - but considering the response so far it's a good starting point. We need a group of core devs who can take care of new committers.

Regards
Mattias Bogeblad

Carlos wrote:
Hi all,

We are also interested on working on maintaining alive infoglue. We think it is good product and as Mattias said, at large scale sites probably one of the best. About the community and joining to the project I think this thread it is not the best place to gather more people. It could be quite more suitable to update the infoglue web site with some information and, at least, a link to this forum/thread. This discussion it is buried on a offsite forum not much visible even for infoglue users.

Carlos
Public University of Navarra