Exponent & the Future

Well, the 96.6 GA is released.  It's good to have a new stable release out there again.  I'm glad it's out the door now as that will allow us to start with 96.7 and other projects we have in the hopper.  We have a lot of new features coming in 96.7.  For a more complete list, see the CHANGELOG in the 96.6-GA release.

It might not look like it on the surface, but there has been a lot of action on the Exponent project lately.  Now that the release is out the door we can start releasing some of these new features.  There are some REALLY exciting things coming down the pipe too.

First a little bit on how release will be going down from this point on.  I think we are planning to start releasing on the 1st of the month no matter what, starting with 96.7 alpha.  We will just keep popping out alpha and beta releases until the current revision gets to the point where we feel solid about it.  Then we'll put it thru the paces and put out a new GA.  The main thing that has held up releases (even alpha and beta releases) is testing.  From this point on, I'm planning to do a quick, but good round of testing in house before release just to make sure nothing major is broke and then get the release out the door.  Then it's up to the community to test and provide feedback.

Ron (Ron Miller is a new developer here at OIC) is working on getting a bug module finished up.  Once he does we will get it up on the exponentcms.org site to log bug reports into.

One cool new feature coming to 96.7 is "Form Helpers".  They are smarty plugins for creating forms in the views, where they belong, and getting them out of PHP.  If any of you have ever tried to customize a form in Exponent, you know how pain it can be.  Well now all forms can be built right in the views with easy to use Form Helpers.  The forms will have good markup and be highly stylable via CSS.  We will get some technical docs up on how they work in a future post.

A couple weeks ago I finally started on the SEF URL router and it's working pretty well.  I'm going to go ahead and sneak it into the 96.7 alpha release.  It's pretty cool.  It works much like the Ruby on Rails, and Cake PHP routers.  The initial go will will see the URLS taken in the format of http://yourdomain.com/module/action/param1-name/param1/param2-name/param2.  As we work on it and refine it we will be able to customize the URLs on a per module basis via mapping files.  It's gonna be pretty cool.

I have also start a new Exponent Framework, currently code named Acorn (plant it, water it and watch it grow).  When finished it will be a full blown MVC web application framework.  It will function much like RoR and Cake, but will retain a certain amount of Exponentiness too.  The developement on the Framework has come along MUCH quicker than I anticipated and we might have something to release for developers and early testers in the not too distant future.  Most of my off hours developement time will be spent working on Acorn and the new Exponent.  I'll have more to say about this in future posts.

Also on the exciting news front, Phillip (optiondelete) has been working on some cool UI/Frontend changes and added features.  I'll let him post to tell you about those, but they are going to completely change the face of exponent.

As of the next release (we might release it before Nov 1, but if not it will be out Nov 1 no matter what) we will be removing several outdated or otherwise useless modules.  Also all themes but the default theme and all the lang pack will probably be stripped and put up for download elsewhere.  I am working on a themes site where themers can go post their work and users can go to download themes.  Users can search themes by most downloads, highest rated and so on.  It should work a lot like thememonster.com or one of those types of sites.

There's more stuff coming too, but this post is starting to get a little long.  I will try to get more details up about some of the new stuff mentioned here in upcoming posts.  Phillip and I are going to try to make the blogging a regular thing.  So stay tuned and check back often...more to come.