Wonderblog

Yesterday we declared the "feature freeze" for Wonderland 0.5. This marks a major turning point, as we move from building new features to a focus on stability and bug fixing.  From now on, we will be much more careful about the changes we make to the Wonderland code base: every change must be associated with an issue or RFE in the issue tracker; and we will pay special attention to avoid API changes.  This is really the home stretch of development, as we do our best to test and polish Wonderland before the 0.5 release.

To make the Wonderland 0.5 release as stable, scalable and useful as possible, we will need the help of the whole Wonderland community. Now is a great time to contribute bug reports, test cases and documentation (and we always appreciate bug fixes, too). To this end, we've created two new resources: nightly binary builds make it easy to install and test Wonderland, without the need to build the source; and the Testing 101 guide gives a quick overview of the bug reporting process, including how to most effectively describe bugs and test cases.

While feature freeze is a significant milestone, it is definitely not a stable release.  Over the last few weeks, we have made a lot of changes that need some time to settle in. Our next target for a stable version is the 0.5 preview release at the end of August.  The preview release is timed to give academic Wonderland users a stable base for the start of the school year.  During this time, we will of course be fixing bugs, but we will also be working on modules to extend the core Wonderland functionality, including a new video player and our integrated PDF viewer.

There is still lots of work to be done, but I find this phase to be some of the most fun. As we shift to more testing, we get to spend more time using Wonderland in realistic contexts. This lets me shift my viewpoint, from seeing Wonderland as a development project back to seeing it as a tool for collaboration. And now that the core is settling down, we can take some time away from the main features to build some fun extensions.  Stay tuned for more on that.