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You've seen us ask for your opinions and some of you have seen us taking the first step towards building a new version. This has lead to many questions and in some cases even insane speculations. With this blog post we want to give you a idea of where we are going and what lies ahead as far as the 1.x branch and 2.0 development is concerned.
We are working on a new website for the FuelPHP community. This new website will be the central hub for all developers using the framework. It will be used to for all interaction between members of the community, and between the community and the development team. This website will provide a new forum, API docs for the different versions of FuelPHP, all online documentation, a section on tutorials, screencasts, howto's, etc, and a section to post snippets of code that you feel can be of interest to others. Using a tagging system all information can be cross-referenced to make it easy to find the information you are looking for. We will introduce a comment system which will allow you to provide feedback, and will include a rating system not unlike StackOverflow. It will also be the location to find Fuel Cells, FuelPHP's new package management system, which will be based on Composer. This means that in the future you will also be able to install packages directly from Packagist.
This is not only a website for the community, but also a website by the community. The code for the website can be found in this github repository. Feel free to fork it, and contribute to the development of your FuelPHP online community!
First of all: the fact that we started working on 2.0 doesn't mean the 1.x branch is dead! We will keep supporting this branch, even after the first release of 2.0, for at least 6 months, and possibly even for longer if there is a demand for it. The first order of business will be the release of a version 1.2 based on the current 1.1/develop branch, which has grown a little beyond the scope for a 1.1.1 release. The release of 1.2 will also mark the End-of-Life for 1.0.x because as far as we've seen so no one uses that anymore thus working on a 1.0.2 release would be a waste of everyone's time.
Do not expect any big changes in the 1.x branch anymore though, all future development upon 1.x will be geared towards improving and bugfixing.
The development of the next iteration of FuelPHP is in its very early alpha stages at this point. Many decisions are yet to be made and some already implemented choices may still be reversed. This will mean that almost everything said about it by a non-Core-developer is to be taken with a huge bucket of salt. The official places to find information about FuelPHP 2.0 development are the Roadmap and the FuelPHP organization on Github (which was set up to develop 2.0 aside from 1.x development & maintenance).
As always we're very open to feedback on all of it and we can always use your support. It is however smart to confer with us before you do anything with it. Otherwise you run the risk of working on something we've already decided will go away or be rewritten in another direction.
The next big version will still be FuelPHP but it will also feature some huge changes. Having said that we'll make sure that for most of the static interface and object usages we'll provide full backwards compatibility. Once we go into Beta/RC mode we'll provide clear upgrade instructions on how to move from 1.x to 2.0, either with a legacy support package or by rewriting to some of the bigger changes.
[late update: you can read more about 2.0 in the next blog]