After many, many delays due to illness and distraction, we're going to start putting together a practical roadmap for KNotes releases. In this post I'm just annotating an earlier post I made in February to point out what got done and whether priorities have changed. Bizarrely I note that the date posted is just a few days before I fell ill, but that the first tasks in the list did get done. I must have been pretty effective in those days :o).

Here is a hastily thrown-together list of issues I feel ought to be resolved before we publicise knotes. I'll be adding to this list, and annotating it, over the next few days.

OK - the list I made then was:

• Cleaner css/image skinning for weblogs - DONE - but user requests and practice since then have forced us to add 'skinning interface' to the release-1 features
• Complete fast_folders' move of 'no-wrap' from custom main_template to custom skin_path - STILL ESSENTIAL, JUST NEEDS SOME CAREFUL APPLICATION OF AN EXISTING SOLUTION
• Complete the migration to fast_folders as view for KNDiscussion - AFTER VACILLATING ON THIS I NOW AGREE THAT IT IS ESSENTIAL
• Complete the discussion-view for weblogs - DITTO

So, the top item on February's list got done (in a day or so :O), but we've since had so many demands for a skinning interface (other than the ZMI + ZPT+CSS knowledge) that I feel I must add some basic support for end-user skinning before we call KNotes 'released'. I'll write some notes on what 'basic' skinning support means in another post - choosing a stylesheet from options, setting (ugh!) background colours and banner images TTP, etc

The other items remain important, and remain undone. The fact that they remain undone is not surprising. I've only been back on my feet at all for a month and a half, and that has been totally occupied with catching up with project work, essential writing and putting out admin fires. Oh - and getting up to speed on e-portfolios and social bookmarking / social software integration issues. Weirdly, in the three months I was ill, the state of internet applications for the masses seems to have ratcheted forward a good big step after years of what looked like frustrating inertia to me :o)

One final point on those pre-release to-dos from February. At the time, I had planned to create a fallback, plain-html, accessible discussion view for the blogs and discussions, but to throw most effort into a fast javascript-savvy client loading data only and allowing many contextual actions without overall pageloads. In the months since, I had started to worry that the work to complete the javascript-savvy interfaces was - though 98% done - still a post-release issue. Since then, though, our users have in effect demanded faster and more convenient interfaces. Also, the 'AJAX' webapp style has begun to get some hype and support, which has made me less apprehensive about the accessibility issue. We will have a totally javascript-immune, accessible to all devices interface for browsing discussions and replying to them. But for early releases I am willing to keep that extremely crude and to put all the effort into a really fast and transparent application-like discussion interface.

More to come. Steve is back from Canada this week; we'll try to make a do-able and understandable roadmap within a few days.