Eclipse Phoenix
DRAFT 1.0 Plan

Last revised 2005-11-01 ( marks interesting changes).

This document lays out the feature set for the next feature release of the Eclipse Phoenix project designated release 1.0.

• Release deliverables
• Release milestones
• Target operating environments
• Compatibility with previous releases

Plans do not materialize out of nowhere, nor are they entirely static. To ensure the planning process is transparent and open to the entire Eclipse community, plans are posted in an embryonic form and then revised from time to time throughout the release cycle.

The first part of the plan deals with the important matters of release deliverables, release milestones and release-to-release compatibility. These are all things that need to be clear for any release, even if no features were to change. 

The remainder of the plan consists of plan items for the projects under the Eclipse Phoenix project. Each plan item covers a feature that is to be added, or some aspect that is to be improved. Each plan item has its own entry in the Eclipse bugzilla database, with a title and a concise summary (usually a single paragraph) that explains the work item at a suitably high enough level so that everyone can readily understand what the work item is without having to understand the nitty-gritty detail.

Not all plan items represent the same amount of work; some may be quite large, others, quite small. Some plan items may involve work that is localized to a single subsystem; others may involve coordinated changes across several projects within the same top-level project; and others may involve coordination with other top-level projects. Although some plan items are for work that is more pressing that others, the plan items appear in no particular order.

With the previous release as the starting point, this is the plan for how we will enhance and improve it. Fixing bugs, improving test coverage, documentation, examples, performance tuning, usability, etc. are considered routine ongoing maintenance activities and are not included in this plan unless they would also involve a significant change to the API or feature set, or involve a significant amount of work. The intent of the plan is to account for all interesting feature work.

Release deliverables

The release deliverables are:

• About Us static HTML re-write
• Current Foundation-owned static content refactored in PHP template system.
• Pick a skin/template with the help of community feedback and implement on PHP template system

Release milestones

Release milestone occurring at roughly 4 week intervals exist to facilitate coarse-grained planning and staging. The milestones are:

• 2005-06-30 - Milestone 1 (1.0 M1) - About us static HTML re-write
• 2005-08-15 - Milestone 2 (1.0 M2) - Foundation static content refactored on CMS
• 2005-08-31 - Milestone 3 (1.0 M3) - Pick a skin/template
• 2005-09-30 - Milestone 4 (1.0 M4) - Apply skin/template to CMS and to non-CMS pages

The 1.0 release is targeted for 2005-11-30. All release deliverables will be available for download as soon as the release has been tested and validated in the target operating configurations listed below.

Target Operating Environments

In order to remain current, each release of an Eclipse project targets reasonably current versions of underlying operating environments and other Eclipse projects on which it depends. 

The Phoenix 1.0 release depends on the following:

• HTTP/1.1-compliant web browsers
• CSS 2.0-compliant web browsers
• JavaScript 1.4-compliant web-browsers

The 1.0 release of Phoenix is designed to run on any configuration supporting the above components.

Phoenix 1.0 is tested and validated on the following reference platforms:

Internationalization

The English strings for Phoenix are provided as the default resource bundles. Translations are not provided with this release.

Compatibility with Previous Releases

Compatibility of Release 1.0 with exisiting eclipse.org website

At this stage it is too early to determine the compatibility issues with the current eclipse.org website.

Themes

The changes under consideration for the first release of Phoenix address a few major themes:

• Accessibility and Quality - improve the accessibility and quality of the information needed by the community to perform their tasks; provide a single access point to that information; link and rationalize the information, thereby reducing duplication of information and removing access to out-of-date information
• Workflow - Establish publishing models (workflow) and guidelines for Eclipse.org
• Collaboration - Implement collaboration tools (e.g. Wiki, blogs) and make the most of networking opportunities
• Showcase - Create a showcase for members and the community

Each theme has a number of items; the relevant theme is identified for each committed, proposed, and deferred plan items.

The items listed reflect new features or areas where existing features will be significantly reworked. Numbers in parentheses link to bugzilla problem reports for that plan item.

The current status of each plan item is noted:

• Committed plan item - A committed plan item is one that we have decided to address for the release.
• Proposed plan item - A proposed plan item is one that we are considering addressing for the release. Although we are actively investigating it, we are not yet in a position to commit to it, or to say that we won't be able to address it. After due consideration, a proposal will either be committed or deferred.
• Deferred plan item - A reasonable proposal that will not make it in to this release for some reason is marked as deferred with a brief note as to why it was deferred. Deferred plan items may resurface as committed plan items at a later point.

Committed Items (Phoenix project)

Remove Frames. Remove frames to simplify linking (79856) [Theme: Accessibility] Work completed

RSS feeds. Create RSS feeds for eclipse news, articles, etc. (74378) [Theme: Collaboration]

Usability. Improve eclipse.org website usability. (87912) [Theme: Accessibility]

Wikis. Support Wikis for projects. (87949) [Theme: Collaboration] Work completed

Screenshots. Provide screenshots to stimulate visitor interest. (12669) [Theme: Showcase]

Proposed Items (Phoenix project)

Polling software. Implement an infrastructure to enable polling (79225) [Theme: Collaboration] Work completed

Deferred Items (Phoenix project)

Blogs. Support Blogs for committers. [Theme: Collaboration]

Article rating and sorting. It should be possible to see which articles and tutorials have been viewed the most, and which have been rated the highest, and to be able to sort the article list on this (in addition to date, topic, number of comments, type, etc.).. (87782) [Theme: Showcase]

CMS. Use of a content management system with content workflow and approval (74378) [Theme: Collaboration]