Things I would like to get paid for
Probably every open source developer is experiencing this from his own pet projects: you have so many ideas how to improve your software, but too few time to get to all of them. I'm in the privileged position of being able to make a living of the open source projects I work with, so at least I get paid for features I want to see in Horde sometimes. But there is still a lot of stuff that takes too much time to implement it in the few spare hours, and that none of my customers considered worth paying for so far. So here is my list of features I'd like to see in Horde personally that need sponsoring:
- Channel Server
I already started working on Chiara_PEAR_Server to make it database independent. This is necessary because it currently only supports MySQL but we run PostgreSQL on all of our servers. Beside that it simply doesn't make sense to make such a package depending on a single database product. I have to add that the server itself is already database independent, but the installer is not. I already made it use MDB2_Schema for creating and updating tables, but I still need to finish and test it.
Once this is done, we could finally install a full featured PEAR channel server and start releasing our framework packages for the PEAR installer. Competition is good. - Installer
Everybody and his dog is complaining that Horde is so hard to install. Now that PEAR 1.4 has hit the streets, it would be possible to package all Horde components as PEAR packages, put them on the channel server (see above) and install e.g. IMP with a simple:pear channel-discover pear.horde.org
pear install horde/imp
These commands would register Horde's PEAR server with the local PEAR installer, download IMP and all dependencies, i.e. the Horde base package and all required framework and PEAR packages, install them, and finally run postinstall scripts that create database tables, create the basic configuration, etc. - Horde Groupware
Horde already is a complete groupware solution, but many people looking for groupware packages are not aware of this fact. Thus we don't gain the same momentum like some other groupware software e.g. in magazine articles or software comparisons.
The goal is to create a groupware "application" that works out of the box and contains all Horde modules that make sense in a groupware context. The focus would be on simplicity and not as usual on flexibility. This strength of the Horde Application Framework is also its weak point: you can integrate Horde and its applications into almost any existing infrastructure, but this makes it more difficult to install and configure at the same time.
Horde Groupware would bundle Horde, the framework packages, the webmail, filter, address book, calendar, tasks, notes, and password modules, as well as all required PEAR packages. It would be pre-configured to use a database backend, you only have to run the database scripts (maybe even this could be done automatically) and finish the database configuration through the web interface. - Horde Live CD
A Horde Live CD would probably be based on Knoppix, Morphix or DSL, and XAMPP. It would contain a MySQL/Cyrus/Postfix mail system setup and allow to boot any server from the CD into a Linux distribution with everything installed and configured to try out a complete Horde Groupware installation, basically a local Horde demo server. I probably would sell these CDs through CafePress, so I'm not sure if this is really suitable for a sponsored development. How much would people pay for such a CD? Not the typical developer or geek reading blogs like these, but administrators in the need to make a decision for a web application/groupware solution? - Kolab Support
We already have Kolab support in Horde, and we are actually the only web client available for Kolab right now. But the developer of the Kolab drivers for Horde has fallen from the earth and the code is kind of abandoned since then. There are still a lot of open bugs, and the drivers have fallen behind the development of Kolab 2.
I would like to spend some time closing all the open bugs, completing Kolab support, and work with the Kolab and OpenPKG developers to make the installation easier.
Another issue is Horde's dependency on a database for shared resources like calendars, task lists, etc. There already was the plan to write an LDAP driver for Horde's DataTree library, but this project died silently unfortunately.
