Néstor Sánchez

Gallery coming closer to release

nestor.sanchez@dotnetnuke.com — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:58:00 GMT

After recovering from an illness that ended up in a facial paralisis, I've been able to catch up with the project. I've had 4 rough months in every possible sense, luckily and thanks to the work of the team, specially Matthias, Gallery is closer to be released.

A new Private Beta will be packaged after the remaining bugs are cleared from the Backlog. Only two of those are major and there's a showstopper that's being researched by a Core Team member, since it seems to be cause by Friendly URLs and not Gallery itself. It manifests only in DNN 4.5+ versions. This query shows the remaining bugs (15 or so).

Matthias will recruit some people to start testing before we submit to the release tracker and we will perform a review of the team members at the end of this cycle. The goal is to be able to have a commited hard-working team that is available for forum support.

Gallery keeps moving

nestor.sanchez@dotnetnuke.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:20:46 GMT

Although I am really short on time these days. I am still managing to move push Gallery even though it's as slow as a turtle. Matthias and I have updated most issues and none need to be reviewed by the Team Lead anymore.

Unfortunately testers of the first round were many but results were disappointing. In the next beta we will be using the testcases module that is used by the core, which means that we'll have something that Gallery testers can refer to. It was a bit too vague last time around. Although no show stoppers were found in that Beta (4.2.10).

The next beta is scheduled for next month. It will be version 4.2.11 and should be pretty stable. Hopefully stable enough to become our RC. At gemini you can see that some issues have been added to the roadmap. It is my intention that all outstanding issues that are enhancements or new features find a version home before we have a release. Then, Gallery will at least have a clean house to start the process all over again.

Update on Gallery Beta testing as of Oct 1st, 2007

nestor.sanchez@dotnetnuke.com — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:59:47 GMT

After forming a small team of testers a 4.2.9 version and a subsequent 4.2.10 version were privately released. I want to publicly acknowledge Matthias Schlomann efforts. He's very valuable and helped create Test Cases as well as test functionality itself.

During this weekend I will completely update Gemini to reflect the current status. It's good to see that our Project Tracker is already down to less than a hundred issues and many are enhancements that will not see the light in the next release (4.3.0), which means we will focus on fixing bugs.

Next week will be dedicated to fixing bugs, releasing another private Beta and recruiting members to test. Unfortunately only two out of more than ten people who signed up were able to help. And Matthias did the bulk of testing. I honestly hope that more doers are available this time around. We will be using a nice Test Case module to report results.

After that Beta is finished, the slots for team members will be prepared. Stay tuned!

Gallery progress

nestor.sanchez@dotnetnuke.com — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 13:38:45 GMT

I wanted to take a few minutes to post information about what's going on with the Gallery Project.

Beta Testing
The first thing that was done was to prepare a new Beta but we decided to open it up to a small number of people. Depending on the perspective that either went very well or almost failed. Let me explain: sixteen people applied and were accepted into the beta group. A small number of people posted issues they found. Either there aren't any issues or not many were able to test. I gave ample room for testing, with a simple set of guidelines and a minimum number of test scenarios. All we got was 3 to 5 posts.

Bug Tracking
There were over a hundred issues in Gemini and at list 70% were still opened. Last week I started to validate them and after that process there are about 50 outstanding; and of those 35 are open bug reports that will be validated next week.

New Beta
A new beta is being put together and more people that requested to be included in the Beta group are going to be accepted. Hopefully, all major issues will be ironed out before needing another Beta and the release will be entered into the Release Tracker. If all goes well, the first release of Gallery in almost a year will be out in 6-8 weeks.

If you have questions, please post them at the Gallery Public Forum

Gallery revisited

nestor.sanchez@dotnetnuke.com — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:08:24 GMT

While Chris was struggling to push the Gallery Project ahead, release a new version of the Forum Module and manage his own business workload, it was clear he had more than he could chew. A few weeks ago we talked about this and he chose to sponsor me into Project Lead for the project. After going through some hoops to gain appropriate access, today I had my first official Core Team chat and realized I did not have any significant news about this project. Therefore, I decided to take some time to evaluate where it is at and where the project is going.

As some may have noticed, the Gallery Project has been asleep (to put it nicely) for a while. After I got into the team we were able to release a version that fixed bugs that became visible with the DNN 3 release. Our plans were to make a complete re-write after adding the DAL, since Gallery currently uses XML for metadata. However, as they say, life happens. Chris was overloaded with the Forum Project and his day-job at AppTheory, Tam had to deal with private issues and in one way or another, the other team members were unable to contribute more time. I had hoped new recruit James Jegers could stay on board, as he had already done a lot to clear out many bugs and clean code, but he declined to do so after feeling frustrated with the outcome of his past efforts.

Anyway, reasons are abundant, but I prefer to look at the brighter side and forge ahead learning from the experience.

What's in the works
I was given access to the resources that are available for team leaders only a few days ago and I discovered that there is a lot more going behind curtains than I had realised. It was time to get my hands dirty.

Scott Willhite and I updated the Home Page for the Gallery Project to reflect changes in the team, I created the blog you are reading now, reviewed the Gemini processes with NukeAlexS, updated information in Gemini about versions, reviewed and updated status on current issues, and of course posted my picture .

The latest released version is still in the .net 1.1 codebase and considered Beta (not ready for production). Although many are daringly using it, truth is it has presented some show-stoppers and other annoying bugs. To kickstart the project we scrapped what was done after 3.0.12 and worked on a version based on James Jegers' 4.2.1 release that is in semi-private volunteer testing as we speak. It will be used as the foundation for next versions. More information about it is in this forum post.

Do you want to help?
Whatever can be expected of this project, at this point, is really up to you community members. Right now, we need volunteer testers. Pending issues from the Bug Tracker need top be validated; if you can help, please post your email in the thread mentioned above to be added to the Gallery Testers group.

If you have suggestions, please hang on. We'll accept them after the Gallery 4.3.0 has been released. Existing feature suggestions will go into the project backlog with others and will be prioritized (most likely with community votes).

If you want to contribute, in the coming weeks, the project will publish a call for volunteers. Stay tuned.