Webical Development

I'm happy to announce a new version of Webical was lauched today. With the trunk already tagged a week ago the new demo was finally uploaded today.

New features for this release include:

• user settings
• new datepicker
• improved interface

With this release we also announce a move of our project from sourceforge.net to Google Code. You can check our new project site at http://webical.googlecode.com. The main reason for doing this is the better issue tracker and integrated wiki on google code. We want to use the issue tracker more often, also for internal developer issues and todos.

The release package is available from our new project site as an archive containing a package war, installation files and instructions. All important wiki pages have been transfered to the new wiki and some have been updated. For extended installation instruction see our wiki page How to install Webical. The subversion repository will be moved next week so you can check out the source and build it yourself.

I hope you will all enjoy this new version of webical. We will begin work on version 0.5, with full recurring event support as it's main feature. New feature request are always welcome and can be entered in our new issue tracker.

Planning releases is hard. There is often a whole list of functionality to develop, and little time to develop it. So what functionality comes first? What is most important? Are shiny round web 2.0 buttons really needed at this point? etc etc.

Webical development has been going on for quite some time now (almost one year if i'm not mistaken). A lot of functionality has been developed during that time, but there have been very few releases.
Zoran keeps saying the words "Release early release often" (RERO), and after I read a few articles about the RERO startegy it started looking like a strategy that could fit webical development. Although I've been working on webical for a solid 4 months now, I've only produced 1.5 releases (see the mailing list for that) until now. Maybe the short development cycles and more releases will lead to more new users and developers. The users will see faster progress as well as fast issue fixing. The new developers will have more moments to step into the development process to start working on functionality.

That's why I made an effort in putting a roadmap on the wiki, which is my attempt to make the releases of webical more planned and give more insight to people who are waiting for a release with new functionality, or want to participate in developing webical (I know you're out there!).
The roadmap is meant as a discussion on the functionallity webical should have and an attempt to place that functionality on a timeline. Every functionality will initially be put on the wishlist, and then placed in a milestone if we think the functionality is worth developing for use in webical.

Over the next few days I'll try to update the other wiki pages a bit. A lot of pages are outdated and contain functionality that has been finished but did not have a status update on the wiki. I'll try to filter out all the things that have not been finished and put them on the roadmap again so we can attach them to a milestone. I'll be moving some pages around, and hopefully make the wiki easier to read and navigate.

In the end I hope to make the Webical development proces more open so it's easier to see where the project is going. With the wiki cleaned up, it should be easier to maintain and update the wiki so developments of webical can be tracked better through the wiki (but don't stop reading the blog!).

I created a wiki page to discuss the details of what a webical release should be and what has to be done to properly do a release.