Product update: redesign alpha release, contributions policy and roadmap

Time for a new update on the overall progress of ongoing work!

Note: If you’ve not been following the development of the project, we suggest that you read these previous posts for further context:

https://meta.decidim.org/processes/news/f/1719/posts/310

https://meta.decidim.org/processes/news/f/1719/posts/314 

In this post, we tell you about:

a) the status of the redesign implementation

b) release 0.28

c) receiving contributions

d) roadmap

Status of the redesign implementation

The frontend redesign is slowly taking shape, we recommend taking a look at the GitHub project to get an idea of what things are already implemented (Done column). As usual in software development, as we move forward we find new issues not initially identified, and that makes progress relatively slow.

So, the plan is to release a first Alpha version when the redesign is a bit more advanced and share it with the community (around late May - early June). Then the Beta will come and we’ll have a release party to identify any pending issues. In the next post we’ll explain this timeline in more detail.

Release 0.28

Our current estimate is to release version 0.28 sometime between June and July. The good news is that as we move forward this estimate should become more accurate 🙏.

In the meantime, new patches will continue to be released for the currently maintained versions. The next ones, 0.26.6 and 0.27.3, will be prepared in the following weeks.

Community contributions

In the previous post we explained that we would not accept more PRs until we achieved a certain pace with the redesign. That's why we haven't replied to new proposals lately, although next week we'll be giving feedback to the recent ones with funding.

The guidelines for new contributions still apply, but small contributions (not big changes) that do not affect the frontend can be accepted until the redesign of the admin panel begins. 

Roadmap

Related to that, we’ve been preparing new contracts for the Barcelona City Council for the evolutionary maintenance of the platform, which includes several proposals from the community. We’ll be flagging them as such in the process of new features.

The rest are improvements towards the goal we shared a few months ago (to launch the first major version of Decidim) and that meet any of these criteria:

• Reduce technical debt
• Bring consistency between the different modules and features
• Extract features that aren’t used by the majority of installations to its own module, so we can reduce costs on the maintenance of the project

These developments will run from November 2023 to the end of 2024. We will probably do a specific post to explain the full list.

In addition to this, and looking to the medium term, it is worth mentioning that with the reinforcement of the Association's technical office, we will have more capacity to have a more solid roadmap.

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Thanks to the community for the understanding and patience! Is there any related information that you miss? Do you have any questions? Leave them here 👇