Horde Groupware bundles finally out
The two bundles, Horde Groupware and Horde Groupware Webmail Edition, have finally been released. This is about the current status and some future roadmaps.
I have to say, I'm pretty proud of these releases, not personally but for the whole Horde team of the past and the present. These "marketing" bundles aggregate 9 years of hard development work of many PHP developers in two tarballs.
But honestly, they are not only marketing gags. Of course, I hope that we'll get some more momentum in the groupware market, and I'm pretty sure that we will achieve this goal. But it makes installing Horde for administrators much easier too. Not having to download each component and PEAR package separately, and being able to use the first working install script for Horde, makes the installation much easier. It already has been proven that the installation can be done within a few minutes now.
Some ideas for the future:
- Make the bundled PEAR packages a full featured repository that can be updated and extended separately from the Horde bundles. Greg has some notes how this could be achieved. There is still the issue that such a setup will conflict with patches for upgrading to newer bundle versions, but maybe we simply leave the PEAR packages out of our patches at this point.
- Extending the Webmail Edition with MIMP and DIMP.
- More bundles. Only one other bundle makes sense at this moment, a developer package with repository browser (Chora), task lists (Nag), ticket system (Whups), wiki (Wicked), and cross reference (Luxor). An office bundle might make sense, once more of the potentially bundled applications (time tracker Hermes, inventory manager Sesha, travel expense tracker Gulliver, and invocing module Minerva) become stable.
- Create PHAR archives.
But there's more to expect from the Horde Project in the near future. First we'll release the (fingers crossed) last application releases of the Horde 3.1 release series.
The release cycle for the 3.2 series will start immediately after that. And this series will not only release exciting new features (see the several roadmaps on the horde website). We also plan to release a few more applications that have been in development for a few years now and are used in production in many places already. The final word isn't out, but at least DIMP (AJAX webmail), Wicked (wiki), Whups (ticket system), Ansel (photo gallery) and Agora (forum) probably won't be missing.
And finally, once the 3.2 series is out, it's time for some major changes. Work on the (PHP 5 only) Horde 4 will start. We'll throw out a lot of legacy stuff that has piled up for backward compatibility with PHP 4 and older Horde versions. The architecture will be much more component based, regular installation and upgrading will happen through the PEAR installer. Some parts of the framework will be rewritten or completely replaced, after the lessons we learned in the past, etc. Some (rather technical) ideas are collected here.
2007, here we come!
