JFusion Blog

I am extremely proud to announce that JFusion 1.2.0 has been released after a huge effort of the JFusion Development Team. It has been a little while after JFusion 1.1.3 was released 3 months ago, with 300+ commits of code to our SVN. Since a very large amount of work was done, this release is called 1.2.0 (instead of 1.1.4), as many features have been added in this release in addition to bug fixes. We ask people to upgrade their jfusion installs through the JFusion updater in the component, to take advantage of this much improved version.

If you encounter any issues please post on the forum, or on our bug tracker:
http://code.jfusion.org/projects/show/develop

The list of improvements is too large to mention in this blog but includes:
* Support for Elgg, Oscommerce 2.x, Oscommerce 3.x, Oscommerce XT, Oscommerce Zen, Oscommerce Max, Oscommerce SEO
* Improved usersync that is faster, has auto-resume features to prevent timeout and provides more debug, output in a nice table based view, a percentage completed bar and much more.
* System plugin that ensures session are always synchronised between Joomla and plugins (SMF and phpbb3 support only at the moment).
* improved login checker that can be used to resolve jfusion conflict by administrator without knowing passwords and with improved debug output.
* greatly improved discussion bot
* fixed many bugs in the plugins to ensure that jfusion runs more stable and with more features than ever.
* for a full changelog you can access: http://www.jfusion.org/media/jfusion_1.2.0_changelog.txt

The next generation of JFusion framework is also nearing completion and will be a huge revolution (this is no exaggeration). It is a complete revamp of the framework (no more master/slave, universal jfusion plugin, more software support, universal frameless features, automatic CSS parser, user profile sync, cross domain login support and much much more). More details on these exciting developments soon.

Thanks, Marius (on behalf of the jfusion development team)

After a lot of internal discussion within the team (primarily the developers), we have come up with a new versioning mechanism. The emphasis is now on reaching a stable release as soon as possible.

From now on we shall have a regular version cycle consisting of per defined feature releases and subsequent bug fix releases. The versions will continue to contain three digits as they have till date but will signify both features releases and bug fix ones easily. Let's take the example of version 1.2.x. The version will be part of the 1.2 branch and the last digit x will be upped with every bug fix release, more or less the way it done for Joomla! as well. 1.2.0 will be the first version to take advantage of this new method.

As part of the discussion, it was also found that the way JFusion is packaged at the moment, it will be very difficult for us to call a release as stable. There are far too many extensions that are packaged into one mega package at the moment. All plugins, module, bots and other bits are packaged together and almost all are undergoing rapid development even as I write this blog entry.

In addition to that, not everybody integrates all software(s) that we support on the same site. Most integrate one, or at the maximum two software. So it kind of becomes cumbersome for them to have everything installed on their website. Same is the case with the Modules and Bots.

I am pretty sure that you have been waiting for this Blog Post for quite sometime now. And as I have been saying for some time now, patience pays off. So let me get this done real quick. Here are the details of the release plan as we have come up with for the 1.1.2 RC1 release(Yep it will be our first RC and not a Beta);

Milestone 1(2009-03-20): Freezing features (developers start testing the code, no feature additions will take place hence forth)
Milestone 2(2009-03-25): Freezing code (The testers team starts testing the package, including clean install, update and usage. In the mean time developers repair bugs coming out of this in parallel)
Milestone 3(2009-04-01): Ending testphase, still time to debug for testers until
Milestone 4(2009-04-06): All stop, the HOD builds a test release package. All developers test this from now on, there may be new test packages if needed and features made inactive if they cannot be debugged in the given time frame. The HOD again builds a package at the end of this milestone with various bug fixes.
Milestone 5(2009-04-13): RC1 is released.

A special thanks to Henk for proposing this well planned out release plan! :)

This is a quick FYI. Alan and I started to move stuff for the website to the new server late last night India time. We have made some great progress and plan to make the DNS switch once we have ironed out the last few issues that we are currently facing.

A DNS switch theoretically takes anywhere between 24-72 hours to show up as the DNS across the world refresh one by one. During this period we will be locking down the website on the old server while keeping it open on the new one. This shall help you know if the switch has been made or not.

We have decided to move over ASAP because of the imminent 1.1.2 release which can see a sudden rise in the traffic on this website. Plus our recent tests with the moving of the code website have also been a grand success.

We continue to show our dedication to all Jfusion users with this patch release that addresses some minor issues. The JFusion 1.1.1 beta release was downloaded 1620 times in just a couple of days, an amazing amount of new people to start using JFusion in just a couple of days. This brought to light a couple of new issues that happen with certain rare server configurations and some small bugs. Here is the changelog of the patch 1 release:

-  Removed default itemid of 150 for the login and activity modules

- direct links can now be displayed even when a itemid is entered in the login and activity modules