Magento

Hey Everyone,

The meeting yesterday went very well.  We had a majority of CAB members present and set out to discuss the agenda that I presented in my previous blog post.  We also had Michael Bessolov and Anton Makarenko, the soon-to-be-former and soon-to-be Magento project managers on board.  I’m going to run through a summary of the discussions and ideas presented and I think many people will be very happy with the results.

First, we discussed the frequency of the CAB meetings and have decided that we will set a policy of meeting once a month, around the middle of the month.  We will start discussing a date and time around the first of the month, and once decided I’ll throw up an announcement.  We are also going to work on figuring how we can maybe get some live transcription of the meeting or a way for people to listen in.  In the mean time, we are encouraging CAB members to actively blog about the meeting and what was discussed and their own thoughts, and actively collect feedback from the community.

Second, we discussed our proposed infrastructure changes which we have been talking about for quite some time.  We would like to reconfigure our workflow around many things.  The goal in doing that is to open up the infrastructure to contributions from the community.  The top areas of focus for immediate action are Source Code Submission and Control, Bug Tracking and Wiki.  As I mentioned in a blog post a few weeks back, we courted the community for suggestions.  Development infrastructure is a key part of the community development process and we wanted to make sure we had as much input as possible.  We considered building our own infrastructure from the best of breed Open Source projects as well.  Resources are tight and every man and dollar we use on developing and maintaining infrastructure is time and money not used on Magento Development and so we decided to look for an all encompassing solution for most of what we want to do and many community members kept pointing us in the same direction--Atlassian.  After looking at all the suggestions which you guys gave us and evaluating many other options, we have been solidly considering at the tools developed by our good friends at Atlassian.  A number of other Open Source projects have been using their tools, Jira, Fisheye and Crucible and they look sweet!  Its far from an all-in-one solution, but they may be a solid foundation.  We are going to try and have some test instances up soon and invite some people to play with them so that we can evaluate them and hopefully make a decision at the next CAB Meeting.  I am VERY excited!

Third, we spoke about the new development process which you will be hearing more about soon from Yoav.  The plan is going to be to release Alpha, Beta and Release Candidate tagged releases.  This is going to serve to dispel confusion about when to update whichever version of a release you are running and when to go ahead and upgrade a production server.  Also, the RC will serve as a point where the API if frozen to give module owners a chance to begin updating their code for the upcoming version.  This is something that many community members have been asking for for a while and after much work retooling the release process, we are glad that we could make this happen.  Please look for more info on this from Yoav soon.

Finally, we brought up the transition of the Community Edition roadmap to the CAB and discussed how we can make sure this is effectively carried out.  The first thing I want to say is that after the 1,000,000 emails I got about implementing uservoice, we are going to work on getting it implemented within the next two weeks!  The CAB members will be actively engaging the community to talk about what features you want as well.  I want to stress that part of the purpose of moving the development of the roadmap into the hands of the community is not just to have community members randomly select features as a wishlist and have them magically appear.  It is our sincere hope that as we continue to open the project that the community will not only use the roadmap development process to develop ideas but to also become active partners in the development of the Magento codebase.

Overall, we were very happy with the way the meeting went and have much to work on.  It’s gonna be good hard work, but slowly and surely, with help and input from the community, we are getting there.  I look forward to all the good that the future will bring and to working more closely with everyone.  As always feel free to email me with question and/or comments.

Have a good weekend!

Koby