Glad to hear the final release won't be rushed or overly pared back. Hopefully, having an initial alpha out will be helpful for your development flow.
I've been running the current iteration of my main website on v10 for a whopping 7.5 years, and while I've put in a lot of dev work to get it the way I wanted (with help from Chris and other amazing members of the ocPortal/Composr community along the way), I don't really have any complaints about it today. I was excited about v11 years ago, but I'm actually nervous now that it's getting closer to fruition, because it may require me to dive back into Composr deeper than I have in quite a while to make the upgrade and re-apply my customizations.
Of course, software (especially touching the internet) does rot when it's not updated, so it's great that development is moving again. It looks like I didn't comment on the big post back in November, so let me express my gratitude to you (Patrick) as well as Chris for continuing to carry the torch working on Composr after all this time. It's been almost painful seeing all the attempts you guys have made to build an actual development community around the project over the past years (and I'm sorry I couldn't help more with doing that so far). Here's looking to continued development and hopefully future growth.
Yes, I'm hoping by putting alpha on the bleeding edge release cycle, it will enable more people to be able to test it out and play with it. I'm also hoping doing this will give others, such as yourself, ample opportunity to begin checking out v11 and seeing what would need to be done to upgrade your v10 site to v11.
I think the biggest change with v11 is themeing. While there are some API changes, v11 had its default theme massively rewritten to be more secure, responsive, and modular (thanks to former dev Salman). I made some changes myself as well such as fixing up the theme wizard's color equation system to work better / be more accessible. I also fixed up dark mode. It's not perfect, but it is now a lot better than it used to be.
There should be quite a bit of time between alpha1 and the first stable version of v11 to prepare for upgrades. I anticipate there will be at least a year between alpha1 and the first stable version, though probably longer. There is unfortunately only so much Chris and I can do at a time.
Thank you for your gratitude. I do hope over time adaptation of Composr can grow again, and in-turn, community involvement and development. Tracker activity has been on the rise in the last few months (not just from myself or Chris), which is a good thing.
I've been running the current iteration of my main website on v10 for a whopping 7.5 years, and while I've put in a lot of dev work to get it the way I wanted (with help from Chris and other amazing members of the ocPortal/Composr community along the way), I don't really have any complaints about it today. I was excited about v11 years ago, but I'm actually nervous now that it's getting closer to fruition, because it may require me to dive back into Composr deeper than I have in quite a while to make the upgrade and re-apply my customizations.
Of course, software (especially touching the internet) does rot when it's not updated, so it's great that development is moving again. It looks like I didn't comment on the big post back in November, so let me express my gratitude to you (Patrick) as well as Chris for continuing to carry the torch working on Composr after all this time. It's been almost painful seeing all the attempts you guys have made to build an actual development community around the project over the past years (and I'm sorry I couldn't help more with doing that so far). Here's looking to continued development and hopefully future growth.
Yes, I'm hoping by putting alpha on the bleeding edge release cycle, it will enable more people to be able to test it out and play with it. I'm also hoping doing this will give others, such as yourself, ample opportunity to begin checking out v11 and seeing what would need to be done to upgrade your v10 site to v11.
I think the biggest change with v11 is themeing. While there are some API changes, v11 had its default theme massively rewritten to be more secure, responsive, and modular (thanks to former dev Salman). I made some changes myself as well such as fixing up the theme wizard's color equation system to work better / be more accessible. I also fixed up dark mode. It's not perfect, but it is now a lot better than it used to be.
There should be quite a bit of time between alpha1 and the first stable version of v11 to prepare for upgrades. I anticipate there will be at least a year between alpha1 and the first stable version, though probably longer. There is unfortunately only so much Chris and I can do at a time.
Thank you for your gratitude. I do hope over time adaptation of Composr can grow again, and in-turn, community involvement and development. Tracker activity has been on the rise in the last few months (not just from myself or Chris), which is a good thing.