Recently a team of developers left Jelmer. As I understood, he developed a kernel, and much more. 1) Who will now take its place? 2) How this event will affect the fate of Fuelphp 1.x - 2.x?
Nobody will take his place, as nobody "has" a place in the team. We are all "developer", full stop.
We already knew Jelmer was about to do other things last summer, and you haven't noticed it until he formally announced it. And you won't in the future.
Jelmer started working before the summer on some test code, which he did publicly and under the fuelphp name, without any plan on what the roadmap should be. When he announced it ready for beta everyone assumed that would be a 2.0, which he sort of confirmed in a later blog post.
We are working very hard on new code at the moment, trying to innovate while at the same time trying not to make too significant changes, and keep an eye on backward compatibility. In the meantime, development and support on 1.x continues.
We have decided not to do this development public until we it's stable enough, simply because we don't want a repeat, and people starting to use development code (become it's new and more awesome) that might never see a real release.
When we've finalized the design for the next new major version, and the code base is stable enough, you'll see the current fuelphp repo's being taken offline, and the new ones appear.
And finally a personal word: even if everyone "abandons" Fuel, it will continue to exist. I've build my entire company on it. We build business applications, which usually have a 5-7 year lifecycle, we feel Fuel it's the perfect tool for the job, and we plan to keep on using it.It's also a perfect example why a new major version should not look like a completely different framework. Converting all existing applications (ready and under development) to what Jelmer has produced whould have cost us several tens of thousands of euro's. And there are many other web agencies using Fuel...
I've just checked the Roadmap, very exciting new stuff !!
There would be one thing missing to the Roadmap: Packages List on the website. There are some gems that you can find on github, but I find github search average.
I would gladly make a twbootstrap website, pretty much like the Laravel bundles page.
FuelPHP 2.0 is going to use composer for all packages.
We haven't made the descision if we're going to use packagist.org for the packages (for the moment, during development, we will), or if we're going to setup our own repository.
Okay, problem is most of fuel packages are not listed yet on Packagist. You could add a quick section on the website, listing existing packages, much like : http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/community
Packages list would be based on a json file, located on a repo that anyone could fork to add his package.
FuelPHP 1.x package not, as they are not based on Composer, and they will not be.
We offer repo space on http://github.com/fuel-packages for everyone willing to have their package stored in a central location, and there's also a subforum here where you can make your package known.
If we would go for an itermediate location, the docs would probably be the best option. It's already in a repo, so sending PR's is easy. The question will be if that is worthwhile, as I really hope we'll be on 2.0 in a few months.
I love Fuel and building my web start-up on using it. You continue to be a great support and having people like you in this project is what makes Fuel what it is.
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