[pmwiki-users] 2.0.beta23 released

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 08:34:31AM -0800, Roy Batchelor wrote:
> Is this nearing a non-beta release? I know it's a really mature beta
> at this point, but would be nice to lose the stigma of 'beta" for some
> new sites I'm working on.

This is an excellent question, as I'd like to get PmWiki out of beta
status as soon as possible.  Today I decided to review the outstanding
PITS entries (http://www.pmwiki.org/PITS) and make a plan for what
should be done in order to take 2.0 out of beta.  The complete list is at
http://www.pmwiki.org/PITS/ToDo, but overall the items fit into four
broad categories:

1.  Passwords/authorization.  I'm still working on my version of
user-based authorization, and the password system needs to be made
a bit clearer so that authors and administrators can better understand
what is going on behind the scenes.  I have more details on this
for a later post.

2.  Editing.  There are a number of edit-form related issues that ought
be resolved, especially to make the page more extensible for cookbooks
and other items.  Doing this in a way that is compatible with existing
edit forms may be a bit tricky.

3.  Comments/discussion pages.  This is frequently requested -- some
mechanism to allow people to add comments to a page that are somehow
separate from the page itself.  (I need this for the pmwiki.org site
as well.)  Since any comment capability will tie into both #1 and #2 
above, it's a bit tricky to do "right".

4.  Improvements to search/page list code.  There are a number of 
issues (some not listed in PITS) related to supporting advanced 
searches, lists of pages, trails, and categories, as well as fixing 
some minor bugs in these modules.

In truth, I could probably go ahead and declare a "2.0" non-beta release
based on what we have now, and save much of the above for a post-2.0
release.  However, I think I'd be more comfortable with resolving the
above issues first before declaring 2.0 out of beta.

Also, the documentation still needs a lot of work.  However, I don't
think I'll make having good/complete documentation a precondition for
the non-beta release.

Now that there's a somewhat complete roadmap of sorts we should be
able to progress fairly rapidly from here.

Pm