REBOL Status Report 2010.1
New for this year, these REBOL community status reports will be posted according to progress made or new goals needed, no longer monthly. Some periods will be shorter than a month, some longer. It depends on changes in progress or requirements.
During December
- The Host Kit was released. This was the first release, a draft for several developer to verify that it worked and was buildable.
- REBOL 2.7 releases where resumed. I made a promise to myself that if R3 was not released in 2009, we'd start making updates to R2 again. So, we kicked that off with the release of 2.7.7 for Core and View on several platforms. If you have a critical problem, be sure that you let us know about it for the 2.7.8 release. We will be releasing more often, even if just for a few minor changes or fixes.
- Major website revisions were started. You've probably noticed many pages have changed. Quite frankly, this is a monster project, and thus must be divided into several subprojects:
- Software - The WIP wiki software is running. It's a useful system (40K of REBOL) and saves a lot of time for doing updates and general site management. (I must admit I should have taken the time long ago to make this investment. The system is lean and agile -- new commands and features take only a couple minutes to add.)
- Content conversion - This is a major part of the project. We are looking at ten years of content that was written in many different formats with various tools and HTML editors. Since document management is important, these pages are being converted. Some will play a more important role than others, but now we have a lot more capability to handle them. Some of these pages haven't been updated (or even formatted) in nearly a decade.
- Content creation - We have several new pages that we want to add, several of which will be linked from the new home page. For example, we will be introducing REBOL differently to different groups of visitors. A beginning student wants different information than a corporate IT manager.
- Layout - The page layout is currently quite simple. This is controlled by a few REBOL functions and CSS. I'd like to add a sidebar column to many pages for links to other content or for table of contents on larger documents. However, this isn't critical right now, because the content must be fully converted first.
- Graphics - Making the pages look good shouldn't take much time. I'm holding off until the page content has been finished. Then, we can insert graphics or make other graphical changes as needed.
- Home page - Putting together the home page takes more than layout and graphics, but also marketing. The REBOL message must be clear and handling different categories of visitors is important. We'll be doing this page last, when other parts of the project are finished.
- Subsystems - Various parts of the website use their own scripts, such as this blog, R3 docs, downloads, feedback, and order system. It's not practical to merge all these. The current solution is to have the WIP Wiki build a template page that can be used by other systems to make pages look consistent.
- The RSS feed for this blog was fixed, as I mentioned in the prior status report. It should look better in most RSS readers now, including the Google reader.
Current Priorities
- Continuation of web site overhaul. See above list.
- Maintenance release for R3 -- bug fixes to handle the buildup of tickets in CureCode.
- R3 Host Kit release to all developers. This won't take much time.
- R3 graphics subsystem conversion to new Host Kit. Specifically, the graphics subsystem becomes an embedded extension within the host kit. This feature will be useful to all developers who want to build single executable binaries that include all their extensions.
- Potentially resuming with the R3 GUI project, depending on some external factors.
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