We’ve been talking about releasing a new stable version of Typo since October, with no real success. Frankly, I’ve only spent a few hours per month on Typo since I started working for Google in late November, and that’s not enough to get a major release out. Fortunately, most of the weirdness in my personal schedule seems to be over, now that I’m done commuting back and forth between Seattle and Silicon Valley once or twice per month. I still don’t have as much free time as I used to (Google keeps me busy), but I’m not spending every minute preparing to travel and dealing with the consequences of life on the road.

So, now that I’m back on a normal schedule, it’s time to get serious about releasing a stable version of the current Typo trunk. I’d like to release Typo 4.0.0 before April 1st. Frankly, 95% of the features that we want for Typo 4.0 are already in the tree, so mostly we just need bug fixing and testing. There are a few features that need some finishing work, and one feature that still needs to be implemented, but late March should be workable, if people can pitch in and help a bit.

As I see it, here are the areas that we really need to work on:

  • Trackbacks (they’re still utterly broken)
  • Podcasting (cleanup and testing)
  • Notifications
  • Threaded comment support (optional)
  • Migration cleanups
  • Merge one or two theme contest themes.
  • Bugs, bugs, bugs

I should probably explain the “threaded comments” bit–months and months ago, I wrote some threaded comment code for Typo. Tobi didn’t want it in Typo, so he (correctly) refused to merge it. I’m still using my threaded comment code here, maintaining it in parallel with the Typo trunk. The problem is that there’s no easy way to merge the old threaded comment code with Piers’s big STI patchset, so I’m stuck running an older version of Typo here. I can’t upgrade without either losing all of the threading information that I’ve accumulated or spending some time adding minimal threaded comment support to Typo. I’ve discussed my Big Plan for comments in Typo, but I don’t think I’ll have time to implement everything in the next month; instead I want to concentrate on getting something released, and then we’ll spend some more time enhancing comments for Typo 4.1.

There’s one big thing that I need from people if we’re going to be able to make this schedule: help getting back on top of all of the bugs in Typo’s Trac. We were trying to keep the number of open tickets below 50 for most of last year, but now we’re up to 165, and that’s too many for me to easily manage. So, I need to start applying patches and closing them. If there’s a patch that’s ready to apply, or a simple ticket that doesn’t need more then 5 minutes worth of work, can you please leave a comment here? Thanks.

Finally, to answer the inevitable question: where is Typo 3.0, you ask? Months ago, we decided to skip version 3.0, to avoid confusion with Typo3. So we’re going from Typo 2.x to Typo 4.x. That’s it.