State of the Evolution - July 2014

Posted by on Jul 03, 2014 in b2evolution.net, Development

Here's a quick update on what we've been working on since the last update ;)

GitHub

GitHub has become the go-to place for open source projects of all kinds. It was about time for b2evolution to be on GitHub too. We're happy to announce the new b2evolution git repository on GitHub:

https://github.com/b2evolution/b2evolution

This repository is already ahead of the latest 5.1.1-beta.

We are updating it weekly for now and we plan to use it as the primary development repository in the (near) future. Which means you will have extremely easy access to bug-fixes and new features in real-time as we work on them.

If you're unfamiliar with git and github, it is still very easy to download and keep up to date with this repository if you use the Git Client tool that can be downloaded from the GitHub home page.

Site Redesign

We changed our intro last month and changed it again today! There's so many possible angles to look at b2evolution that it's a bit tricky to choose one that really catches the gist of it...

We also streamlined the design some more. It's starting to look much more modern.

Anyways, as always, feedback on the homepage design is very welcome.

As a side note, let us give a plug to Font Awesome which we're now starting to use across the whole site.

Update: We also updated the design of the news blog ;)

Development Focus

The last month of development was very focused on performance. More specifically on reducing the number of files being loaded with each page b2evolution serves and also the size of the files.

This was achieve with several techniques:

  • Concatenating multiples CSS and JS files into one;
  • Minifying the CSS and JS files;
  • Doing the above two automatically using Grunt (Note: You'll find our Gruntfile.js in the GitHub repository mentioned above));
  • Loading non essential JS files asynchronously;
  • Using an icon font instead of image sprites;
  • Loading some resources from public CDNs...

You may already have noticed page load time improvements on this site. You will benefit from the same in b2evolution 5.1.2.

5.1.2

We expect to release version 5.1.2 before the end of July. We may call it "stable" instead of "beta" if it passes the tests.

Stay tuned!

7 comments

Comment from: Member

Keith

Moving to git is a great thing. It will make it much easier and safer to contribute, through git’s push and pull requests. Linus Torvalds did a talk about it a few years ago (as usual for him, it’s tactless but interesting):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

I used to think that CVS was an OK tool, but he really hits the nail on the head about the various problems with CVS that we avoided using but don’t think twice about with git.

Comment from: Member

Yes, I did see that talk a few years ago indeed… and indeed: “tactless” is what I remembered the most at the time :)

Just updated GitHub btw ;)

Comment from: Daniel Hahler Visitor

Daniel Hahler

Have you considered keeping the project’s history?

Given that you have imported your CVS history into SVN, you could create the Git repo based on this.

Comment from: Member

admin

We actually haven’t imported the CVS history into SVN and we haven’t imported the SVN history into github. All migration tools we tried created so many side effects that we decided against them. Migrating code repositories would have been a (meta) project in itself which we didn’t have time for.

For reference, we will keep the history that already exists on SourceForge.

Comment from: ednong Visitor

ednong

“We expect to release version 5.1.2 before the end of July” - of which year? ;)


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