Standup Reports

As @fiammybe started in this thread, it's time for me to be transparent, accountable, and contribute more to the momentum of ImpressCMS than I have in recent times. This is my commitment to getting stuff done.

David (@fiammybe) and Raimondas (@MekDrop) have been the key contributors to maintaining our current releases and shaping our new major revamp of the core - and I want to thank them for stepping into this and getting a lot of the groundwork completed.

I can't speak for them, or even for you - only myself. I don't just do this for myself, though - it was always done to help the community of users. I have clients that depend on me to provide a solid website for them. However, they are not my primary source of income, so I divide my time.

I can't always control outcomes, but I do have a lot of influence over inputs and actions.

• What did I say I would do?
• What did I do?
• If I didn't meet my objectives, what adjustments are needed and what resources are needed?
• If I did meet my objectives, what is next?

Here's my first list of actions I will take:

1. Post here (at least) weekly - what I propose doing in the coming week, what I did do the previous week, and what obstacles I face.
2. Post when pull requests are ready and request reviews before merging. Code review is critical for us to maintain functionality and uphold security and performance practices of ImpressCMS.
3. Maintain a list of deliverables for the coming release
4. Outline steps necessary for an administrator to prepare their sites for the changes in the coming release.
5. Outline what is required of a module to be compatible with the coming release - some changes have been already shared through the Developer Dashboard under Deprecated, others will be identified because of changes necessary to run under PHP7 and PHP8.

As I mentioned above, I don't just do this for myself. I do have motivations to do this, regardless. Having feedback is definitely going to help me stay focused and provide some energy to get things done. Less feedback and participation will probably mean that it will only take a bit longer, that's all.

Thanks to all who have participated and contributed to getting ImpressCMS this far!

Remember when we were hosting our repositories on Assembla? They had a feature for standup reports, and I added recurring events to my calendar to update my standup reports twice a week - Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings. Those reminders still come up. So - I will use those reminders to trigger updates for what I'm working on.

David also has a thread for what he's working on - we focus on different things, all of them are to keep some momentum going for ImpressCMS.

There's something I want to emphasize - the minimum PHP requirement for the upcoming 2.0 has been lowered to PHP 7.4. That does not mean it will not work on PHP 8. It just means we will not be introducing anything in this release that requires PHP 8 to function. I work with that in mind.

Because I do support sites with a variety of requirements, I do test a wide variety of actions and methods. So, the requirements have been expanded for functions provided and governed by the core, regardless of PHP version.  

I will be looking to have my  pending changes merged to the release branch by Wednesday, and adding an update for some external libraries (PHPMailer among them). Support for Google Analytics 4 will also be part of this release.

Onward and Upward!

Doing some testing before merging in changes and packaging everything up. Found something that needs to be addressed - a function call to a function that has been removed (icms_float). I should have something by the end of the day.

Once I can validate a fresh install, I'll check an upgrade before releasing.

My commitments were to get the release ready for review, and that has been completed, thanks to David and Raimondas.

All major hurdles have been cleared - complete install and upgrade (from 1.4.4) have been successful. There is an open pull request to merge in the update to PHPMailer. Once that is reviewed and merged, we can move ahead with the release.

I need to verify the GA4 changes have been merged - they aren't showing up in the branch yet

There are some things I would like to see added - a responsive theme, for one - but I'd rather get this out and work on some refinements afterwards.

As mentioned earlier, there are some updates to modules that will also need to be done to work with this release. I'll be posting PRs this week for the ones I have found.

For this week -

• Outline steps to upgrade: there are things that will need to be completed before uploading the upgrade files
• Updates to modules identified needing changes to work in this version
• Package release once it passes review

I'm working on a responsive theme in Bootstrap 5, but that is still some way of, certainly if you want it to work nicely on mobile devices (more than 50% of web trafic nowadays) AND be flexible with the standard layout in iTheme.

My initial tests were with PHP7.4. Testing with PHP8.0, there are some errors to overcome. I will be posting updates soon.