CMS Made Simple 2.3 Status Announcement
Hello everybody
Firstly, I would like to thank everyone in the CMS Made Simple community for your continued support. Your testing, feedback, and enthusiasm keeps us motivated to continue making CMSMS better and better.
It's been nearly a year since we released the beta version of CMSMS 2.3, and a lot has changed both in the world, and within the CMSMS Dev Team since then. I'd like to take this time to acknowledge the current situation and how we intent to address it.
The goal of version 2.3, as decided by our lead developer at the time, was to make CMSMS leaner, faster, and more powerful. This ambition, whilst entirely appropriate, risked a path that came at the expense of backwards compatibility, familiarity, and module support if pushed at too hard. During the testing cycle, and, later, when the lead developer stepped down and other team members attempted to continue the work, the team as a whole came to the realization that some of the changes were perhaps too large for a point release and needed further consideration.
We, the Dev Team, decided we needed to go back to a more democratic approach to major code changes. To that end, we have halted work on 2.3 and have begun the process of discussing and voting on each major change--especially those which reduce or break existing functionality. So far the voting has revealed that we are overwhelming in favour of slowing down production and reducing breakage while still implementing the majority of the improvements.
At this point, we are not going to put a timescale on when 2.3 will be released as we know it's more important to get it 'right' than get it 'out', however, things are already progressing. Our next steps as we build the forthcoming release are as follows:
1. We are continuing to support the 2.2 series with security and bug fixes.
2. We are writing a road map to serve as a guide for the development of CMSMS and will make that publicly available. Our goal is to have the road map ready later this year.
Your responses in the big CMSMS Survey that we carried out earlier this year are foremost in our minds as we return the software to its ideological roots of being by, and for, the community.
Thank you again for your support and remember we are always here to help you the best we can. Please join us on the forums or in our Slack channel if you have questions, suggestions, or just want to chat.
Matt Hornsby, Project Manager
with collaboration from the CMS Made Simple Dev Team
