There hasn’t been much visible progress in Slipmat development for a while, so here are some news on whats happening in near future.
Upcoming updates
First, there will be two large updates in next few weeks. First of these will probably happen at some time next weekend or early next week. This one brings vast amount of technical updates to the codebase and underlying techniques enabling us to keep evolving the site with a fast pace plus some minor bug fixes and features. The next update after that is slated for January 1 and it will bring lots of new features including easier event creation, smarter flow for ended events, recurring events, and lots of improvements to the already great request system.
New release model for 2018
In order to keep the development pace high and the workflow as visible as possible, we’re testing a new process for upcoming releases. Starting early January the site updates will be feature-based and they will be planned and designed publicly here on Backstage.
What this means is that we’ll use Feature requests and Issues -boards as a source for upcoming development phases (sprints). We’ll collect one or more features + reported bugs as a main focus point for the next sprint, and the next development phase will focus on that fixed list of items. Releases will happen when all of the items are done and then the cycle starts again.
This workflow will hopefully make the development process more visible and encourage more participation from the community. Release cycles will vary depending on the decided contents of each sprint and of course also depending on the available developer time and resources. Ideally we could make at least 1-2 sprints per month.
…which brings us to the next point!
Call for developers
Slipmat.io is 100% a community effort. At the moment almost all of the actual development (coding) to the project is done by me, but hopefully we can change that. If you are familiar with modern Web development and want to help, contact me (for example private message me here or ping me at Twitter)!
At the moment the developer needs can be categorised roughly in these three categories:
- Back End coding (Python / Django)
- Front End coding (JavaScript / Vue)
- Front End markup / graphic design (HTML / Sass / graphic tools)
if you know any of these, you can help. Or even if you don’t but you want to learn, you probably still can help! You don’t need to be a guru at anything, this is a volunteer project and you will get help and support from others
in addition of actual coding the community needs lots of help in various other topics like
- Helping new users
- Writing documentation
- Marketing / social media
Everyone can help, you can help – if you want to! Reply here or contact me if you want to discuss more. Also check out the help wanted-topic for more!