After several months of development, we have now closed the lid of the feature box and are busy preparing the releases. In this post I'll give you a quick overview of what you can expect during the next few weeks.
The first feature release after a 1.0 is a special one: with all the feedback we got and the real applications we've been working on ourselves, the ideas for new features and improvements are endless. Without surprise everybody wants to get his own pet tweak into 1.1 and it's hard to draw the line which patches need to be postponed for a later version.
FLOW3 1.1 contains various new features but we also took the opportunity to adjust some important APIs, such as the Model View Controller mechanism. The upcoming FLOW3 version is not 100% backwards compatible and this is what we expected. But we found a nice way to ease the upgrade pain: a code migration tool can automatically adjust your code to fit the most important API changes. And for the few parts it can't refactor we'll provide detailed upgrade instructions.
We plan to release two beta versions, followed by the stable release of FLOW3 1.1. If necessary, we'd also release additional betas or adjust the timeline in order to meet our quality standards. Each of the beta releases has a specific goal:
FLOW3 1.1 beta 1 contains all improvements we want to see in the final version. The goal for this release is to get feedback on the compatibility and stability: does your project still work fine after following our upgrade instructions? What did we miss?
Although the first beta contains most of the code of the new major features (HTTP, I18N, content security, ...), those features are not fully documented yet. This is the goal for the second beta release:
FLOW3 1.1 beta 2 contains all features, including the big new ones. The goal for this release is to also get feedback on the HTTP foundation, the localization and translation and all the other gems we put into 1.1. We will provide documentation for all of the new features so you know how to test and use them in your own projects.
Once we are confident that 1.1 works equally fine for you like it does for us, we are ready for a stable 1.1 release.
We currently discuss a few ideas regarding the future release cycle and overall process of releasing new FLOW3 versions. In general we need to satisfy both needs: early access to new features (rather every two weeks than months) and plannable stable releases (rather every three months than every few weeks). What's your take on this, which rhythm fits you best?
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