Looking into the future, 2013 Development Timeline

With yesterday’s announcement of our new social networking service, JomSocial Hosted, we have promised you to release 2013 Development Timeline. This timeline, we hoped would help you understand and be prepared with our 2013 course of action. 

We realize our dear users are generally still in the dark on our plans for JomSocial and the new social networking service, JomSocial Hosted.  Allow us to clarify and show you what’s in store for the next one year. 

Before we start, it would be great if you could click on this image and download a high resolution PDF as a guide throughout this blog entry.

Download the 2013 Development Timeline or view the JPG version.

JomSocial Hosted

As iterated in previous blog entry, being a Joomla component has in a lot of ways restricted JomSocial from performing at the level we feel it should be. Numerous constraints are imposed by the Joomla template, extensions, and most importantly the server environment itself.  What if, we free JomSocial from such limitations? What if we could design JomSocial without being bounded by the squarish wrapper of a Joomla template? What if total trust are given to us, that allow us to handle the server and performance modules that accompany it? 

Thus, we decided to come up with the JomSocial Hosted project. The idea is simple, apply everything we have learned and create a managed social networking platform that is really straightforward to use, and awesome. 

You may test out the pre-Alpha Hosted community here: http://bolt.jomsocial.net. Please use a real email as the system forces your to validate. ;)

Any Suits fan here? View the group on Hosted here.

View this event page.

Joomla 3.0, Bootstrap and JomSocial 2.8

Joomla 3.0 brings forward a much-welcomed Twitter Bootstrap technology that allow templates to be responsive and have mobile support from day one.  To provide support for Bootstrap however is no easy task. It would require us to recode almost every part of JomSocial to follow Bootstrap’s structure and thus, is a Herculean endeavour to be achieved in just two months after the Joomla Bootstrap announcement. Furthermore, we realize that there are a couple of Bootstrap frameworks already under development by fellow Joomla developers. 

Any wrong step in pursue of Bootstrap could easily cost us several months of hardwork.

A realistic milestone is to accompany the release of Joomla 3.1 with JomSocial 3.0, around April 2013. We hope that by then, a global Bootstrap standard would appear that would prevent us from redesigning the wheel. 

JomSocial and JomSocial Hosted, a mutual relationship

Development for JomSocial Hosted was kickstarted around May, with a technology transfer from existing JomSocial code. In brief, we have actually trimmed JomSocial into 12 different components that are tightly integrated with each other. 

Being under our complete control, JomSocial Hosted would allow us to experiment with new advanced features. This allows us to experience it on our own server, debug and optimize it along the way. Once we are satisfied with the performance, a feature will be marked as a Graduate, and will be queued for the JomSocial component. 

We strongly believe this new workflow would tremendously help JomSocial component users by making it more stable than before. 

The same concept is utilized in numerous world-class development houses, such as Wordpress and FogBugz. ;)