It is nearly 23 o'clock. After several weeks of hard work the new alpha release is on the way! The backend was completely refactored* and the frontend structure was changed.
Why am I making these changes?
- They are necessary to bring the code base to the level of year 2009. If you look at our development site. You will see that the wish list (feature tracker) is constantly growing. What was always stoping me from working on the wish list is that one small feature, that would normally take 2h to code, takes 6-8h to make. With the new changes we can be calm that small changes to the existing code will not cause a disaster.A nice improvement from these changes should be the speed. Today I figured out that my development installation of joomla makes 24 queries to the database on the frontpage when joomlacomment is turned off. When I turned on joomlacomment 4.0 beta2 with support for community builder the queries went to 58. The new version makes only 33 :)
What is left?
I still have to write a new installation script, few changes to the frontend and so on. I hope to be ready by the end of the week.
How can you help with all this? As the title of this blog post says: I'm looking for alpha testers :) If you are interested you can subscribe to this Alpha & Beta testers forum.
There will be also a lot of work for translators. The backend doesn't use anymore php files to store language strings. Now everything is stored in the .ini files. Those old php language files need to be updated to the new model now :)
There is work for everyone who wishes to participate! Thank you for the help in advance!
*refactoring is the process of changing a computer program's internal structure without modifying its external functional behavior or existing functionality
