First of all, I would like to thank all our users for their positive feedbacks. What I’m very excited and proud about is how our users feel involved in the project success. Have a look to our forum and translations area and you’ll better understand what I mean. Most of the members try to help each other, propose code snippets and share their tricks. There’s a friendly ambiance and this means the starting of something much more important than a component:
a community.
FLEXIcontent was published in the JED on the 12th of December. In one week we gathered 45 votes and 18 kind reviews, in a category were there are very competitive and powerful components.
I must confess there’s a trick, FLEXIcontent is not a one week old project as some may think. FLEXIcontent beta3 was released in France at the end of August and had already many fans. We decided to wait that long to launch it on the JED for multiple reasons but the most important is that the first impressions the user have remains for long.
In France, it’s slightly different. As I’ve been involved in joomla.fr for about three years now, many people know how I work and trust me. That means if you’ve just downloaded the beta5 on extensions.joomla.org and test it in the best conditions, you can say a big thank you to the French Joomla Community. They did the first debug layer for you and helped me a lot to make it more stable and usable!!!
We are now finishing to fix the small issues discovered in the beta5 release. It should be ready very soon.
We were planning a release candidate end of January but we decided to change our plans for question of terminology. The next release will be called “stable” because it’s stable :-) Obviously it was much more stable since the beta4 than many stable component we see ;-)
Here you have a short roadmap for the first quarter of 2010 (There are the main features only)
FLEXIcontent 1.6 (expected beginning of February)
- Field alias (to allow multiple display for a same field)
- Frontend submit
- Second cache layer
- Template installer
FLEXIcontent 1.7 (expected end of March)
- Content kits import/export.
- Advanced filtering.
- Advanced search engine.
That means that we expect this FLEXIcontent 1.5 stable just after the New Year.
By the way, Akarawuth and his team have just confirmed that the first component snapshots for Joomla 1.6 are planed next week ;-)
Just a few words about our business model: Yes there’s a business behind, yes there are companies behind and yes the product will be supported and followed.
We will soon publish more detailed information on that subject. But commercial support offers, training and consulting, custom dev, partnerships will be soon proposed on the website.
But the most important for you to know is: Yes, FLEXIcontent component will remain FREE.