(subject with apologies to debian-devel-announce)
It's probably time for an update as to my plans and progress of late, and in the next couple of months.
For various reasons I haven't worked much on Openguides since the last release in June, and there are now quite a few issues piling up to be dealt with. Nick has done some good work with moderation and feeds, which needs to be checked over and released, and there is a growing list of minor bugs of various sorts that needed to be looked at. In addition there are the big things - authentication, spam prevention, a worldwide portal, etc etc. One specific task I will be looking at is the correction between WGS84->OSGB to correct the innaccuracies in our current Google Maps output for UK guides.
I believe Nick is still coordinating with his employer the possibility of getting a developer there to do some CSS work for us with a view to producing some new default CSS.
I'm going on holiday for a week next week, and I'll have various other things to take up my time after that, but in September I hope to be able to look seriously at OpenGuides again both from the software release angle and the bugfixing/features angle. I also plan to finally upload OpenGuides itself into Debian (the last sooner rather than later, in the hope of making it into the next release).
If, in the meantime anyone would like to take on any of the tasks at http://dev.openguides.org/report/1 then please do. Drop me a note to get a trac login if you don't already have one, assign the task to yourself and hack away!
There's also the issue of dedicated OpenGuides hosting, which I've been looking at for a while. I have some spare hardware which I might be able to press into service as a dedicated guide hosting box (possibly providing supporting infrastructure such as mailing lists, SVN etc) so I hope to look into this in September too. I think this would allow us to streamline things in terms of making sure people can easily run guides without their own facilities if needed, and providing a platform that those who need it can access to maintain the various central services.
If this actually happens depends on the availability of hosting as well as some tests run on the hardware to see whether it would perform well enough.
In addition to all that, I would like to suggest that we have a real-life hacking/bug squashing some time in September/October. I've talked to Mark Gaved about meeting up for beer in Oxford and it's possible that we can open this up and possibly turn it into combined hacking and pubbing. We'll post date suggestions on the list nearer the time.
I think that's all for now.
Cheers,
Dominic.