HWDMedia Plugin

Thanks for your feedback and suggestions.

To be clear: No, there is no secret club here . We are open about our work and releasing reports and betas of our work in progress, of course with source code and a well php-documented new CBLib.

More importantly, we are not only listening to valuable feedbacks, like yours above, but also taking them in account. Which of course can push a bit release dates. That's why we are never giving exact release dates. So it's ready when it's ready.

So your affirmation that we are not willing to share is incorrect and i'm feeling it as being unfair: We have already shared it in each beta! We are using the php-doc format to document our APIs, so that when you use any reasonable IDE, all documentation is visible while writing code, and all auto-completions work well. And with PHP-documentor it's easy to generate good online documentation. Also something that we plan to do on the web when CB 2.0 stable is released.

To the contrary of what you write, I don't recall that Joomla was publishing API-upgrades documentation on alphas and betas. Reason is simple: During those stages, the new APIs are work in progress and are constantly improved by steps, and the documentation would be obsolete and thus incorrect in no time. Additionally, as we will be providing backwards-compatibility, there is no rush to use the new APIs.

Our current CB API documentation, available freely in this section:
www.joomlapolis.com/downloads/downloads-single-items/cat_view/77-free-member-download-area
and is still valid for upcoming CB 2.0 beta 5 (more information available on our latest update on our homepage and today's newsletter, so that it is easier to find for all users than a forum post reply).

We are eager to release CB 2.0 and all of us are working days, nights and week-ends on it, when not spending time in the forums and mandatory admin and sysadmin tasks.

Kyle is right in telling to use CB 1.9.1 for stable sites, as upgrading to 2.0 will be an easy task, as has been planed.

Back to CB 2.0 work !

We are also fully open on our work and tasks and here are the links if you want to follow the progress:

All tasks (includes resolved tasks): forge.joomlapolis.com/projects/cb/issues?query_id=48

remaining tasks: forge.joomlapolis.com/projects/cb/issues?query_id=51


P.s. it's not CD, it's CB, like Community Builder

Guys, lets end this. You are clearly defensive of your great product, and your fellow designers. I am not taking issue there, but please understand that even reading your available documentation there is no way I would know that a new beta release included changes that broke many previously functioning plug-ins or that there is a plan to create a legacy mode. You have a lot of bug recording and tracking which is great for those down in the thick of things, but the message I am getting is stay away from 2.x till we are finished then we will get to documenting how you can work with it. I still do not know how a third party developer would go about making a plugin for the new version, that is the 'secret" I was referring to. Seems to me waiting till your done will mean that many third party developments will not be available for some significant time and that seems to put any practicable use of 2.x some significant time out.
Back in December when I decided to go the 2.x route for a site that needed at least a year or more to mature and get working it seemed the right decision. 80% of what I needed was already core and a few well established additions, I needed to write or change a couple of items for custom features, able to let members e-mail some files and such. Now I see that was optimistic. I either back out to the current version, trust your backwards compatibility will eventually come good or go a different route. No hard feelings, just seems like the extent and consequences of some of your changes was not well understood by me back in December.

Sorry if we came through as defensive - was not really my intention but I can understand your reading things this way.

Some current facts that will help you at this point.

See latest announcement here:
www.joomlapolis.com/news/18418-community-builder-20-progress-report

that gives a progress report on CB 2.0.

It should help with some of your questions.

Fact is that our goal is to keep a legacy layer to enable B/C and give third-party developers (and ourselves) time to convert plugins for full (non-legacy) CB 2.0+ compatibility.

So if you want to help us you can install the next CB 2.0 beta 5 and test your HWDMeida Plugin and post back findings. This will really help us.

Just a quick reply to tell that I do understand what you are saying, and that we are taking (and already mostly have taken) your concerns into account.

I'm sorry too that it came through as defensive. In fact we have pro-actively taken your concerns into account, not to defend ourselves, but to mitigate the issues that you and others have raised during our beta 4.

Beta 4 has refactored some 1.x API implementations, and introduced some backwards-compatibility issues on parts of the 1.x libraries that weren't meant to be used as APIs, and also a few compatibility bugs. We have already fixed most of those (a couple left before beta 5 can go out very soon).

Regarding the targetted-100% API compatibility layer, that's the goal of the very next beta 5, and we are making very good progress on that one for a release pretty soon as already written in the progress report.

As all (or more precisely, all that are correctly using our CB 1.x API) third party plugins will (should) be compatible with CB 2.0 from release day 1, everything should be smooth for most CBers.

So thanks a lot for your contribution in helping reaching sound decisions. When beta 5 is released, you can upgrade and give us feedback about the compatibility if ok, great, if not with exact error you are experiencing, so that we can fix.

Thanks again! And really appreciated feedback!