[xwiki-devs] [Proposal] XWiki 6.0 + 5.4.1 roadmaps

Hi devs, XWiki 6.0 ======== As usual here’s a proposal resulting from discussions I’ve had with XWiki committers who work at XWiki SAS for 6.0. * Collaborative Applications (Meeting, Calendar, (new) Forum, Tasks, Doodle, Photo) - Caty to work on usability and design (she’s started already at http://design.xwiki.org if you wish to follow the work). Andrea who’s a contributor is helping on the test + implementation part. There might be another contributor joining too. This work is currently done inside xwiki-contrib. * New skin! Caty for the design and Guillaume Delhumeau for the implementation part. We’ve been dreaming about this skin for a while. Caty has whet our appetite with screenshots from Junco (http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Proposal/JuncoSkin and http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Junco+Skin) and from Flamingo (http://design.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/Skin4x). The idea is to establish new strong foundations for new skins (like standardizing on bootstrap classes for example) + have a new L&F. Caty and Guillaume will make proposals on the list about this. * At last we agreed to work on identifying performances issues (especially page load times) and work to fix them! Thomas is in charge of leading this extra important domain. One idea is to establish some automated tests to measure current performances and get a baseline so that we can then monitor our progress and start fixing things (and ensure we keep getting better all the time in the future). Thomas will send some proposals on the list too on this to let us know how he plans to tackle performance improvements. * Of course we need to keep some time to fix any remaining issues we get on the major feature we developed in 5.x + some improvements. I’m thinking about our SOLR search, Multiwiki integration, EM/DW, scalable import/export, etc. Thomas needs to finish the scalable import feature which is already well under way (see below). * Marius agreed to lead an investigation on CKEditor to see if it would make sense for us to use it as a replacement of our homemade editor. The general issue is that maintaining a WYSIWYG editor takes time and this is not really our core business at xwiki. We have 2 choices basically: have someone constantly working on improving our WYSIWYG editor or integrate an existing one so that we can benefit from the work of others. In the past few years we haven’t  added that many features to our editor so it’s time to evaluate the feasibility and cost of using an external editor such as CKEditor. * The way users develop applications in XWiki hasn’t changed much over the past 10 years. Since then there’s been an explosion in the area of JS frameworks. We want to make it super easy to develop modern applications using XWiki (read ajaxy applications with new dev models). Marius agreed to lead this investigation along with the help of Guillaume Delhumeau. Since it’s an important aspect of XWiki and a complex one, they’ll need to drive various discussions and brainstorming with everyone and make some proposals so that we all agree to the directions we wish to go towards and so that we can start implementing it in 6.1. * Denis is going to continue working on Script signing as way to replace the existing Programming Rights which has shown its limitations. Denis has committed a new Crypto API in 5.x which is a strong base for the script signing implementation. In addition, during those discussions some raised a list of JIRA they consider important and that would be interesting to tackle if we get the time: - Support 2 roles for users for app within minutes: application creator and data creator  - XWIKI-8757 - xwiki.cfg & xwiki.properties merging - Add default column and sort choices in AppWithinMinutes livetable setting - XWIKI-9659 - Save & view a section should go to the section anchor instead of the top of the document - XE-1335 - Add a message for the Livetable's empty state - XWIKI-7821 - "Space Templates" should also create the space preferences page - XWIKI-9712 - The Wiki UIExtensions should check the rights before executing extension points - XWIKI-9156 - Add an explanation next to the fields in user profile - XWIKI-6307 - When creating a new sub-wiki, pages are listed with guest - XWIKI-9888 - Cannot remove all panels using the Panel Wizard for space preferences - XWIKI-9891 Please comment if anyone sees a concern or if I have forgotten something! XWiki 5.4.1 ========= In addition we identified the need for a 5.4.1 release to: - finish important issues for the 5.x cycle and any leftover from 5.4. Our idea is to have usable and stable implementation for the bug items we worked on in 5.x: SOLR search, multiwiki integration, EM/DW and scalable export (scalable import has been pushed to 6.0 since we considered it too dangerous to plug by default in the default import UI in 5.x). - implement support for IE11 (there are only a few issues open). Marius agreed to work on the IE11 fixes. The reason we wish to implement this support is because we’re seeing more and more users reporting issues and asking for this support. ATM we support IE till IE9 only. IE10&11 are currently not officially supported at http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/BrowserSupportStrategy It would be nice that after 5.4.1 we could edit this doc and mark them supported! Dates ===== I’m proposing the date of 17 of Feb for the final release of 5.4.1, assuming 5.4 is released on the 3rd of Feb as currently planned (i.e. 2 weeks after the release of 5.4). For 6.0: - 5.0M1: 10th of March 2014 (ie 3 weeks) - 5.0M2: 31st of March 2014 (ie 3 weeks) - 5.0RC1: 14th of April 2014 (ie 2 weeks) - 5.0Final: 28th of April 2014 (ie 2 weeks) TOTAL: 10 weeks, ie 2.5 months. WDYT? Thanks -Vincent