ImpressCMS has multiple releases of the project that are maintained and supported concurrently at the moment. All these releases need support of course. Sometimes, the definition of the term 'support' can be subject to interpretation, and sometimes that interpretation can yield surprising results.

Support for a release is very important, but it also has an impact on the amount of effort that can be invested in new development. If we dedicate all our development effort towards support, there will never be a new version of ImpressCMS, and that's not our goal. (more...)

In Belgium, it's customary to start a new year with one or more New Year Resolutions (note the capital letter). In most cases, those resolutions are as short-lived as they are impractical : very. Resolutions like 'No More Alcohol'! or 'I'll lose 20kg' are amongst the most popular around the changing of the year. No wonder most people give up, if those are your goals.

But, it has become customary as well that you get bombarded with news items on television, radio and in the written press helping you with keeping those promises you made to yourself. Most of these news items focus on the same thing : don't go too far, and keep it simple.

Now that's an approach I can relate to. I will go even further and implement this good advice in practice.

My New Year's Resolution for ImpressCMS is instead of 'take it easy', 'make it easy'. ImpressCMS is a great system, but it has several rough edges. These rough patches are sometimes preventing people from seeing the power and opportunities that ImpressCMS offers.

I'm no PHP Guru by far, but I can start by identifying small enhancements. If I get some more people to work with me that way, I'm sure we will see improvements at a breakneck speed.

We’ve decided to label the ImpressCMS 1.2 branch as a long term support (LTS) branch, coexisting alongside ImpressCMS 1.3.

Long Term Support means that the ImpressCMS 1.2 branch will continue to receive security and bugfix updates throughout the entire ImpressCMS 1.3 lifecycle, up until 1 month after the final release of ImpressCMS 2.0.

Wow! The reality of our history just sank in - ImpressCMS is about to enter its 5th year! There have been 4 major releases and 12 other final releases during that time, along with all the alpha, beta and release candidates in between. With the release of ImpressCMS 1.3, we have embarked on an entirely different path, one where we have begun to unload all the additional weight of (poorly structured) legacy code. 

When Marc_André and I were planning for the 1.3 release, it became clear we didn't want to be burdened by a roadmap. But, we didn't want to just wander around and hope we'd stumble on something significant, either. We set about identifying The Big Things - things important to everyone that could be the foundation of great community sites. 2 things kept coming to the top - Performance (Does it work?) and Usability (Does it work for me?). We also committed to Underdoing the competition and Leveraging the extendibility. Now our challenge is to turn those things into reality.