Coppermine Future Development?

[pols1337]

Hi, so this is a friendly inquiry into the future development of Coppermine.  For the most part, I've been fairly pleased with Coppermine since I'm using it to power six independent galleries on my website, and I've tweaked and changed and played with many parts of my galleries.

In particular, I'd like to ask if you have any plan to release a major revamp of Coppermine in the future?  Or is all future work related to maintenance and security releases?
 
Joel

[Αndré]

We plan to release a further major release, unfortunately the dev team is currently quite small and the progress of cpg1.6.x is currently negligible. So please don't expect a major release soon, there's no time schedule.

[phill104]

On the note of a small dev team we are always on the lookout for keen volunteers.

[pols1337]

Thanks for the update.  I'm not a developer myself at all, but if you need someone to help out in a non-tech manner, please let me know.

I'd like to make some concrete suggestions:
1) Since you're looking for volunteers, why don't you put that on the homepage, or add a page for volunteers at the top (next to Home / Forum / Project / Download etc)?

2) Maybe think about sprucing up your homepage and forums?  It's not a problem of performance, since posting and everything seems to be quite fast.  It's a matter of appearance and public perception. 

3) Delete old parts of the forums and simplify.  Make it clean and fresh.  I recognize that there's a lot of historical and educational value, whether it be pieces of code or common problems, but Coppermine has matured to the point where the historical and educational values of old posts are nominal.   

Anyways, I hope you don't consider my suggestions to be rude or judgmental in any way.  I'm obviously a big fan of Coppermine and you have a wonderful legacy, but it seems as if Coppermine has been frozen in appearance and major development since the mid-2000's.  My comments were to hopefully encourage you to think about ushering Coppermine into the new and modern web even if it's just a facelift on the website.  You're competing with the likes of the new Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr, not to mention the other free gallery software like Piwigo and the Gallery Project.

Joel

[lurkalot]

2) Maybe think about sprucing up your homepage and forums?  It's not a problem of performance, since posting and everything seems to be quite fast.  It's a matter of appearance and public perception. 

3) Delete old parts of the forums and simplify.  Make it clean and fresh.  I recognize that there's a lot of historical and educational value, whether it be pieces of code or common problems, but Coppermine has matured to the point where the historical and educational values of old posts are nominal.   

I agree the site needs a bit of a spruce up.  It looks so old fashioned now.  I'm probably the only one in the team who uses the Curve theme on here, because the Core theme went out with the ark. lol..  The Curve theme is also the default for Coppermine, so that says something IMO.

Home page could probably be achieved quite nicely by using a portal (but you know this), and this would make it more in line with the look of the forums.  But, these decisions are up to the senior team members, not me. 

[Αndré]

Home page could probably be achieved quite nicely by using a portal

Any suggestions? Ideally it should be bridgable to SMF, so we can use our board accounts to maintain the content. As we've just a few pages (home, news archive, team, plugins) it should be quite fast to migrate the content once we've found a system.

[pols1337]

Just in case you're still looking into portal software for SMF:

SimplePortal -- 137,000+ downloads last updated Jan 22, 2014
ezPortal -- 34,000+ downloads last updated Jan 22, 2014
TinyPortal -- 38,000+ downloads last updated July 2, 2013

[gmc]

Thanks... We have users of both tinyportal and simpleportal on the dev/admin team (and one on the tinyportal support team.)

I think its more a matter of time availability right now.

[lurkalot]

Just in case you're still looking into portal software for SMF:

SimplePortal -- 137,000+ downloads last updated Jan 22, 2014
ezPortal -- 34,000+ downloads last updated Jan 22, 2014
TinyPortal -- 38,000+ downloads last updated July 2, 2013

Actually we have a new version of Tinyportal on the horizon. Currently testing it. We just need to iron out a few bugs before release.