2.1 development going on

[emanuele]

I know, I know: the current dev team is a bit hermetic...
Oh well, let's give a sign just to let you all know we are not sleeping.

Has been two months since the last message about 2.1 development and I can imagine many of you are wondering: "are those slackers still working on 2.1?".
The answer is: "Yes, we are!"

In the last two months the activity has slowed down a bit (as we said we aim at avoid new features...even if... ), anyway there have been 157 commits (yes, not a lot, but at least 3 a day), of those some noteworthy are:
1) a nice update to the theme (with a patch of about 2700 lines, thanks Ant for your work on that),
2) the default avatar galleries of celebrities have been removed and replaced with a simple gallery of generic images,
3) a huge commit from Spuds (a patch of about 3700 lines) fixing most of the issues with code documentation,
and of course many other things including fixes for bugs reported after the release of the alpha (even though some are still open ).

So, what's left to do before a beta?
Still a bit. You know, we are picky!
Well, that's not entirely true, what we really want is to avoid a (very) long beta period and many beta rounds.

Is your help needed? Of course it is!
As usual feel free to download the most recent version of the development branch and start playing with it!
Bug reports, bug fixes, bug verifications, anything related to bugs (except introduce new ones, that's my field ) is more than welcome at that moment. A small warning: if you are submitting code for a bug that is not reported, expect a lot of questions. That's part of the game.

Of course I expect you would ask: "how am I supposed to use that thing?"
Here it is: http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/User:Emanuele/guide/How_to_create_an_install_from_repo
a short guide that explains how to create an install and an upgrade package straight from the code downloaded from the github repo. If you find it not clear enough feel free to edit and improve it. that's what wikis are for!

Have fun and let us know the outcome of your testing!

[CountryLady]

Thanks for the update, emanuele, and deep appreciation to all who contribute to SMF.

The Alpha version is SO exciting, it is difficult to be quietly patient as we anticipate the first beta.

Let those of us without development skills know any way we can communicate our enthusiasm productively.

[mrintech]

Thanks for the update

[Akyhne]

Nice to hear the project is not stalled (I didn't expect it to be).

[Colin]

Great work guys.

[Antes]

I know you guys doing your best !

[Bigguy]

This is great to hear. Excellent work. keep it up.

[4Kstore]

Always is good read information about the progress.
Thanks and keep working

[Powerbob]

Installed the Alpha on my test site and it looks great 

Well done guys

[Petter B]

I heard SMF 2.1 is going to be released with a mobile theme. Is there anywhere we can have a look at it?

[Akyhne]

1) a nice update to the theme (with a patch of about 2700 lines, thanks Ant for your work on that),

How close is the theme from being finished? I just installed the latest package from 05-11-2012 (or 11-05-2012 if you want... maybe 2012-11-05... 5th November 2012!!!) and there are quite a few issues in the layout.

[Antechinus]

Not that close. Why? What issues? It's still alpha y'know.

[Akyhne]

I'm not complaining, just wanna know if I should report what I find. But if the theme is still in progress, then you'll probably find and fix those issues yourself.

[Antechinus]

TBH I haven't done thorough testing in all browsers yet. Since all the browsers we will be supporting are basically standards compliant for CSS2 and HTML, I've been doing most of the work in Firefox for the moment. I've done some checking with other browsers, but may have missed some issues.

Also, I've only tested on W7 so far, so it'll have to be checked with the other OS options.

This is as well as the actual structural stuff still being a bit WIP anyway. If you think anything is seriously borked, by all means point it out. If it's just minor tweaks, probably just ignore it for the moment.

[Akyhne]

It's just minor tweaks.

[Antechinus]

Ok, well if they are still there in a couple of weeks, start hassling me.

[emanuele]

there in a couple of weeks

This is pretty dangerous to say.

[Petter B]

I heard SMF 2.1 is going to be released with a mobile theme. Is there anywhere we can have a look at it?

Will there be a mobile theme?

[Irisado]

I think that you're moving pretty quickly to be honest.  It can't be the work of a moment to sort out the beta version, especially as there were a fair number of minor glitches to report back regarding the Alpha.  Just keep up the good work .