Gallery2:Roadmap:2.3

Updated R2.3 List

• Note that this roadmap had been defined at the beginning of the development cycle of Gallery 2.3 and is superseded by 2.3 Release Blockers

Must Haves

• Language Pack Manager (User:Jozefs)
  • Select and install packs for all plugins at once, including core.
• Package Size - English-only release package
  • Reduce the default package sizes considerably.
• Add a progress bar for all Item-Add methods (User:Valiant) √
  • Improve Realiability and usability of a very important core feature that way.
• Downloadable Plugins Support for Different Versions of G2 (User:Bharat) √
  • DP should provide the APIs versions in its requests so that the gmc_repository Drupal module can choose a repository that is compatible.
• WebDAV bugfixes (User:Jablko)
  • Fix the remaining WebDAV bugs. Not all are must-haves, but OS X support is required.
• Anti-spam module (User:Bharat) √
  • Akismet would be good. Must be simple to configure and use.
  • Initial plan to extend the comment module and only provide akismet functionality for comments
• Ajax Item Admin interface (User:Jablko)
  • merge into trunk.
  • Add formVar and elementId Smarty modifiers.
  • Move block / container templates into main templates directory, to facilitate blocks which render JavaScript to update themselves and blocks which can be both blocks and containers.
• Embedding Improvements - e.g. fetch any module block via GalleryEmbed, maybe finally polish the SoC embed module. See Gallery2:Embedding:Development Roadmap
• Enforce entity types (User:Valiant) √
  • Security improvement: enforcing entity types at load time makes sure malicious users injecting ids can't force loading the wrong entity.
• Improve URL Generation Performance (User:Valiant) √
  • Improved GalleryUrlGenerator::generateUrl() performance by a factor of ~4.
• Remove the per-plugin locale folder (User:Bharat) √
  • The large package size is causing issues with ftp and subversion and makes Gallery seem bloated
  • Reduced Package size dramatically (#folders 5600 -> 500)
• Event / Error Logging (User:Bharat) √
  • Implement an API and a UI for logging errors and other events
• Make jpegtran an official module (User:Valiant) √
• Turn on Smarty template path caching (User:Valiant) √
  • Turn smarty.compile_check off
  • Significant reduction in stat calls per request
• Themes can override all module templates (User:Talmdal) √
  • Modules now have a new template version
  • Themes can override any template a module provides
• Make EXIF block uses AJAX (User:Mindless) √
  • Performance / usability improvement
• Added Windows Vista support for Windows Publishing Wizard (User:Valiant) √
• Make webcam module accept file:// URLs (User:Mindless) √
  • Webcam module can now retrieve images from local filesystem.
• Create maintenance mode API and UI (User:Talmdal) √
  • You can now put your G2 into maintenance mode programmatically
• Fix session data truncation issue with MySQL / DB2 (User:Talmdal) √
• DB Backup Feature (User:Talmdal) √

Ought To Haves

• Better Captcha
  • Implement a more robust captcha image √ (slightly better, and there's a recaptcha module)
• Security: input-validation framework (User:Talmdal)
  • Task 132141.
• XMLRPC module / REST API -> trunk - Time to review and polish the module for primetime. (User:ckdake)
• Performance Improvements
  • Minimize per-request file I/O
  • Minimize modular architecture at runtime
  • Move modular design to config time where possible
  • Move file based caching into the database
    • Measure performance increase
• Refactor ACL support to make thousands of user/user-albums efficent (User:Valiant)
• Usability: Site admin reorganization
• Scheduler Module
  • Required for other features like future publishing of items, expiring items, digest mode notifications, periodic tasks.
• Get rid of the g2_statusId and g2_navId and from urls (User:virshu) √
  • If this means deleting those two features, User:Bharat is totally ok with it.
  • Refactor navId / Navigation Code
• Notification module (User:talmdal / User:Zimzat) √
  • Finish this module and get it integrated.
• Scripted installer
  • Important to improve situation with yahoo, fantastico and other re-packaged distributions that are very slow at updating or bad at providing a quality product)
• Lightweight Event System (User:Jablko) √
  • Stop querying all active modules at runtime
• PHP-based gettext fallback (User:Joe7)
  • Get rid of our gettext dependency.
• Give modules more template hooks
  • Makes life easier for UI designers
  • Modules should be able to arbitrarily add code to the header and footer of the page (like to add a page counter, etc
• Express Upgrader
  • There should be a one-click way to do an entire upgrade
• Implement MPTT (User:Joe7)
  • Also need performance metrics (speed, scalability, load) to see the impact of this change - Joe7

Nice To Haves

• Permissions: it shouldn't default to grant all users to delete each others albums
• More Permission Bits - talmdal is working on that
• EXIF Data in DB - For performance and searchability. (there's now an SoC project for this, so I doubt it will make it into G2.3)
• Testing / QA - More Appliances - Appliances for MS SQL, Oracle, ...
• Usability: Get rid of g2_ as the default form variable
• Security Improvements - Work on 1, 2 other smaller security improvements
• Finish CSRF protection task (auth-token): Add auth-token expiration through sliding window / multiple auth-token approach.
• Usability: Permissions Management - Add a default / easy mode and keep what we have as an expert view. Plus improvments to the existing view / controller.
• Add support for site-wide status messages (technically a major theme API change, but we may find a way / trade-off to add it w/o)
• Add support for per-page impression hooks / "invisible blocks"
• Usability: AJAXify the progress bar
  • make it a DHTML overlay instead of an interstitial page
• Stability: Overhaul the rewrite module (my require API change)
  • Change the rewrite module so that it has a minimal footprint in the .htaccess file. Just enough to delegate to the PHP code and let the PHP code interpret the url.
  • Allow each module to register urls that it wants to control, like Drupal does
• Features: Rewrite the RSS module
  • It's way, way, way too complicated. Replace it with something very simple
• Support views delegating to other views.
• Hooks in register module to support OpenID, LDAP and HTTP server auth. (User:Jablko)
• OpenID module (User:Jablko)
• LDAP module (User:Jablko)
• Nice-To-Have's from Gallery 2.2 (carry over to G2.3)

Resources

• mindless: not available for specific tasks, but is around for reviews, occasional bugfixes, release process
• Joe7: interested in working on performance related tasks (MPTT, ..) and in adding php-based gettext support with translation caching
• valiant: maybe one larger task, generally available for reviews
• bharat: generally available (will work on 1-2 larger tasks continuously, do bugfixes, reviews, etc)
• talmdal: generally available (will work on large tasks, bugfixes, etc)
• jablko: generally available, e.g. lightweight event system
• zimzat: will be working on the notifications module
• virshu: generally available
• ckdake: ? (xmlrpc)
• dmolavi: can support the integration tasks
•  ?

Schedule

• Initial plan:
  • The feature freeze should be 3 to 6 months from now (rather 3): Features freeze ~July 30th, 2007.
  • 1.5 to 2 months of testing, bugfixing and polishing after the feature freeze
• Update (January 2008):
  • Feature freeze for risky changes is in effect since fall 2007.
  • Tentative release date for a first release candidate is end of May 2008