So, I've just finished wrapping up the remaining presents, am back home with the family, awaiting the joys or otherwise which are Christmas and thought why not provide a brief update on our progress, nearly four months to the day since the first beta release of 2.0 (August 25th to be precise).

The last four months have been a pretty exciting time - as far as development can be exciting I suppose. Earlier in the year development was slowing a bit, with real life commitments effecting many of the developers. Fortunately the last few months have been pretty active - in December alone the changelog has some 140 lines - and there's still another week to go.

Since the release of beta one we've had some 315 bug reports - the vast majority of which have now been fixed. We're working hard to get some important changes into SMF over Christmas so we can look towards beta 2 in the new year. SMF 2.0 is practically feature frozen now as we attempt to tidy up the remaining elements and make improvements where required - and we're certainly aiming for a much shorter public beta/RC process than with 1.1.

I'm now getting more and more gutted about the fact that I'm not going to be at the MotM in the New Year but I've provided some content for it and hope to dial in at times to take part in what is sure to be a fantastic event - and meeting my fellow team members would be very cool. Fortunately I had the opportunity to meet Compuart in person some four weeks ago which was an invaluable experience as we brainstormed some of the future developments with SMF, which I of course cannot reveal here

I want to take a minute out of my blog post to congratulate the phpBB team on releasing the final version of what I assume is technically 3.0. I've always been a huge advocate of friendly competition and phpBB is probably the most used free software out there, and has been for some time. It's a huge achievement getting a major release out the door, and no doubt it will make other developers (myself included) look to see where we can improve our software. I also note with interest that vB 3.6 will be upon us soon and they seem to be taking an interesting direction in regards to community features which I'll probably check out when one of the other boards I frequent upgrades. Fortunately (from my point of view) SMF 1.1 is still not really behind the curve in relation to the other software out there, and 2.0 is obviously a step change from that.

So, what's for 2008? Well - development wise - we really need to do some work on our templates (CSS/HTML etc) in the New Year - to get it up to a much higher standard. Then we're going to be concentrating on quashing the remaing bugs and moving towards a public beta. I'd love to give a date for this but alas history shows that I'm always wrong when I do this. The problem with donated time is real life get's in the way (Or sometimes doesn't!) making estimations extremely taxing. I'd like to get a public beta of 2.0 out around Easter but that really depends on how stable beta 2 proves to be. Fortunately our team and beta testers are doing lots of work testing so hopefully it won't be too bad.

Anyway, sorry if this has been a somewhat boring post. It just remains for me to wish all those here a safe and happy Christmas (For those who celebrate it) and a prosperous New Year (Whether you celebrate it on the 1st January, 7th February or otherwise!).

Grudge