Beta Update

Beta Update: Crowd Fusion 2.0.0

Mar 8, 2010 9:48 AM

A few weeks ago, we sent out the following email to all the people who have signed up for our beta program:

Dear Fusioneers --

Today we are rolling out our first major open source release: Crowd Fusion
2.0.0.

Crowd Fusion is still evolving at a rapid pace and we have tried diligently
to keep our updates easy to understand and to implement; we see major
version upgrades as an inconvenience that we won't undertake unless there
are substantial worthwhile enhancements for our developer community.

Moving from the previous beta release to version 2.0.0, we've made a myriad
of bug fixes and two significant underlying structural improvements:
installation no longer includes/requires the sample application and the
system database (containing the state of plugins, elements and aspects) has
been moved out of MySQL and into an XML file.

Installation of Crowd Fusion is now all about starting out small and light.
In fact, upon installation there's just a very simple "Hello World"
front-end with no plugins installed at all. This dramatically improves the
speed of installation and serves as a solid foundation on which to build
applications. Many installation bugs and feature requests reported by beta
testers have also been addressed in this release, including the ability to
install Crowd Fusion into a subdirectory off of a domain.

Aside from solving some unfortunate consistency problems, moving the system
database to an XML file has many advantages. Upgrades to plugins, new plugin
installations, modifying elements, upgrading aspects, etc. will
automatically produce a time-stamped backup of the XML file to serve as an
audit trail and recovery mechanism. In the event that your CMS becomes
unusable after a change, you can edit this file by hand or simply revert to
a previous backup. It also makes the state of your system portable to new
Crowd Fusion applications that may not share the same content.

Yes, yes, we know you don't have access yet! 125 of the 800 people who
signed up for our beta program are now active. Once our active beta members
have had the chance to try all of the new code out and debug it for the rest
of you, we'll activate more developers.

Let us know if you've got the time to try out Crowd Fusion and we'll try to
get you fast-tracked. We want to make sure these major version upgrades are
infrequent -- and smooth!

-- Brian, Craig, Ryan, Rus and C.K.

If you've followed our recent presentation at New York Tech Meetup or you're planning on meeting us at SXSW this week, make sure you sign up for the beta if you haven't already, and if you have and you have the time, please let us know that you'd like to be fast-tracked and we'll see what we can do.