Hello. As you all know the world is currently working out how to operate over the next few months as our scientists and governments make moves to mitigate the spread of Covid-19. At CMS Made Simple we understand that for many of our users this may involve some considerable disruption to both their businesses and their personal lives. As a response to that, we wanted to let you know how we will be changing our activities to help you.
Usually, we keep a robust release schedule and actively work to develop the software. When a new release comes out we appreciate that it has an effect on our users and our module developers in that there may be additional tasks and potentially inconvenient tasks of upgrading sites and amending modules to work with the new version.
In a normal business environment, we believe that the minor work this can generate is a fair price to pay for the ongoing development of the software. However, in the current world situation, where many users will be firefighting for their clients and their own businesses, we don’t want to needlessly add extra difficulties to your workloads. Because of that, for the next three months we will be putting a hold on further development of the current beta version.
We will instead be releasing 2.2.14 in the coming months to address some minor security and housekeeping issues.
This actually works well on another level as we have some internal decisions to make regarding the direction of the software. Without going into too much detail here, we as the Dev Team have become mindful that some changes in the next version would force our users to adopt new working methods without giving them any real choice. We have unanimously agreed in the last week or so, that whilst we do think the new methods are the future of the system, we want the choice of if and when they are adopted to be down to the individual user. We want to bring CMSMS back to its roots and be 'user first'. Thus we are using this time to consider our roadmap and make sure that CMSMS remains open to as many experienced developers as possible, using the methods they choose.
We will review the situation in the summer and consider our release schedule based on the world situation then. In the meantime, we are here to help. Most of the Dev Team are small business owners themselves and we are all in the same boat as you. Join us in the forums, join us on Slack and bring us your concerns – if we work for the many and support one another through these difficult times, we can make sure that as many businesses are still on their feet and creating great sites and apps in CMSMS at when things return to normal.
Thank you for being part of the CMS Made Simple community. You help to make it great!
The CMS Made Simple Dev Team
