Over the Hill

After almost four years of incessant development, we're finally at a point where we can start a stable branch. "Stable" being a relative term, of course, seeing how during this entire time, the codebase has powered a number of production websites. What has changed is that, thanks to midgard-portable, we've shed our last unmaintained dependency, so we can expect to run sites on a stable set of APIs for the forseeable future. This means we can provide a point of reference for porting old Ragnaroek sites, and at the same time, we're free to make some larger changes to the master branch without having to worry about backwards compatibility too much.

What exactly will be done next is yet unclear, but there is a large laundry list of topics that need adressing. Here's a few of them, in no particular order:

• Replacing HTML_Quickform with the Symfony Form and Validator components, which should give us much greater flexibility with regards to form handling
• Making use of all the new APIs Doctrine provide. This should improve performance for data-heavy views considerably
• Better CMS interfaces: Some preliminary work on this has already been done (e.g. Create.js integration, AJAX editing & toolbar cleanups), but a lot more is still to come
• Porting to Symfony's HTTP Foundation, and eventually HTTP kernel

As you can see, the future won't get boring. But if it gets too exciting, there'll always be 9.0.x to fall back on.