Post-UK update, And Changes For The Future
We've finally returned from our U.K. tour, and other than some ongoing woe over a lack of reliable mobile broadband (and a web server that went a little flaky our last week overseas) the trip was a great success and a lot of fun.
Scotch on the Rocks 2011
We spent some time prowling around Scotch on the Rocks in fabulous Edinburgh, and I can't say enough about how fun that ColdFusion conference was, and what a great city Edinburgh is. I'll be counting the days down until we return. It was also great to finally put some Twitter names to faces, and to talk about our work and the Mura CMS with people who are actively working with them. One of those conversations in particular, with Guust Nieuwenhuis, was on how important the Blue River-developed Translation Manager plugin was to the EU community. I passed those thoughts on to the guys at Blue River, and wouldn't you know they went and made the plugin available for free! Good going, guys.
Mura CMS Training
We also held a 3-day Mura CMS training seminar in London, and it too was a great experience. We managed to get through all of the core material ... just ... and had some time to explore some of the specific issues that people were trying to resolve in their own Mura CMS development.
The last day, dedicated exclusively to plugins, was really exciting if not a little madcap. We built a plugin up from an empty directory in less than an hour, and moved from there into some more advanced concepts and using FW/1 as a base. Because of the wealth of material, post-training discussions have led me into developing a dedicated, 4-day training seminar specifically focusing upon plugin development. The sessions will play as follows (though this is still early days and may be modified):
Day 1: Mura Core (API, events & renderers, Mura Scope)
Day 2: Mura Plugin Development (Introduction & Key Concepts, From-Scratch Plugins, Events, and Plugin-Plugin communication)
Day 3: FW/1 and Plugins Part I (FW/1 Overview, Plugin Structure, Integrating Mura)
Day 4: FW/1 and Plugins Part II (Subsystems and Display Objects, Permissions, Administration, Practical Examples & Labs)
We'll use FW/1 because it's simplicity make both the overall concepts easier to digest and expand into other more complex frameworks, and because we find it's very simplicity makes it ideal for expanding the already rich and comprehensive Mura API without adding weight or redundancy.
As to where we'll be hosting the sessions, that is still left to be decided. We want to balance accessibility and cost, and of course any input we receive will help guide our decisions. Ideally we'd like to have 2 or 3 training seminars before the end of the year, with at least one of those in the EU region again.
Plugin Development, and Our New Plan
Before we left for our U.K. tour, I ran a "5 Plugins in 5 Days" self-challenge both to see if it could be done (yes, but exhausting) and to finalize some concepts and examples for the training that was about to happen. One side result of that was an influx of support requests, issues and updates that we hadn't really prepared for (especially since we were heading on the road trip). While we do absolutely want to support and resolve all issues with the plugins, it also made me realize that without a solid plan we could quickly suffer the "death from a thousand small cuts", as it were.
Our primary focus is still developing client projects, as well as releasing some large core plugins (chiefly Meld Forums and Meld Ecommerce, and to a lesser extent Meld Gallery). Because we need to find a balance between supporting open source development (which, again, we love and respect) and keeping our guys in chips and sneakers, we've decided that a couple of our projects will instead be released (or remain) as commercial products only.
Our biggest project, Meld Ecommerce, will remain open source. This is core to our goals and an open source Ecommerce solution is something I have always wanted in the ColdFusion realm. I'm also very much looking forward to seeing Slatwall by Greg Moser (and others), another open source Ecommerce plugin being developed for the Mura CMS. This project is as much about adding something elementally important to the ColdFusion community as it is about our company goals, and having an open source foundation for Meld Ecommerce will never change.
Meld Forums 2 will, however, now be released as a commercial plugin. We will be releasing open source plugins/extensions for MF2, but the core application will have a commercial license. This will allow us to contribute the required amount of time to Meld Forums without sacrificing development on our open source projects. This also means that it can now become a priority application, and has a new target 'beta' launch date of April 1st and for general availability by May 1st.
We will continue to develop smaller and larger open source plugins, and have plans for some really powerful tools in the areas of event management, online forms, communication and "social". Hopefully this change in our overall business plan will make all our projects more sustainable, supportable and available that much sooner.
