SummerCAMP, the annual Campware conference, brings together developers and users of Campware products to reflect on the past year and plan for the new one. This year, the sixth annual conference was held July 27-29 in Prague, Czech Republic, and was the most successful one to date. A wide range of topics were discussed including how to improve and help the Campware community, design collaboration with Parsons School of Design, Campware sustainability, how to promote ourselves better, and the beginning of a mysterious new project called 'The Radio Package'. Read on for Paul Baranowski's recap of the first day's events...
Day One of SummerCAMP started out with a recap of the past year, assessing what has been accomplished and where there have been problems. For Campware as a whole, the developer infrastructure was overhauled with the servers installed to a common platform (Ubuntu), Subversion repositories were created for code, the project management software was switched to the Trac application, a demo server was created to allow people to test out our software without having to install it, the Campware.org web site was overhauled with a new look to display the news and show all of our products, an RSS feed for the news was added, and we started the Campware newsletter.
Campsite has released 12 versions this past year - 4 major versions and 8 bug-fix versions - and was downloaded over 10,000 times. As for the code, we've had a major overhaul of the PHP backend to separate the interface from the business logic, which in layman's terms means it is much easier to add features now. Usability has gone way up as we have refined the workflow and redesigned almost all screens for ease-of-use.
Other major themes for Campsite development this past year were the continued simplification of the installation process and maintaining websites. Also, the development process is completely in the open now - designs for new features are posted on the developer wiki page and requests for feedback are posted on the campsite-users list. Not to mention all the features that have been added such as comments, file attachments, flexible article types, javascript WYSIWYG editor, and improved translation management. Overall, the most productive year for Campsite yet!
LiveSupport has continued development and has progressed quite well given its size and complexity, and has benefitted from professional graphic designers being involved from the very beginning (thank you Parsons!). However, the LiveSupport team missed the May deadline to release version 1.1 "Freetown".
A number of reasons are behind this delay: poor project management, some developers moving on to other opportunities, and the project scope being bigger than the resources available. The new deadline has been set for September 29th, and new project managers were assigned to the project: Paul Baranowski and Mugur Rus, the developers behind Campsite.
An overview and demonstration of Cream was presented, and though it has extensive capabilities, it was made clear by our users that this product would need an overhaul of its workflow in order for it to be useable by a wider audience.
After the recap, our power users gave us feedback. The Campsite power users expounded the features on their wishlist (now filed in Trac under different milestone headings), and they also made it clear that some do not feel involved in the development process, a topic that was addressed later on Day Two.
When it was all done we had a lovely barbeque in the garden...
Campware News
