11 October 2011

by Johan

A Great Joomlatools Summer

Summer is one of those times when work slows down and people take time off. Not at Joomlatools! We worked very hard last summer to make Joomlatools better, faster, and much more. Here is a little overview of what we worked on :

DOCman 1.6

We listened to your feedback and released DOCman 1.6 for Joomla 1.7 at the beginning of the summer.  DOCman 1.6 brings the same stability, performance and security you know from DOCman 1.5 to Joomla 1.7.

This release was followed by maintenance releases for DOCman 1.6.1 and 1.5.11 a few weeks ago. For more info about the exact changes, also see our changelogs.

Members Center

Together with the release of DOCman 1.6, we switched to a membership club model similar to that used by many of the Joomlasphere’s other landmark companies and launched a brand new Member Center.

You can now subscribe for 12-months and gain access to all our products, future releases and updates.  The member center gives you access to all your extensions and translations. During the course of the summer, we migrated all our existing DOCman 1.5 customers to the new Member Center.

We have big plans for the member center. The team is working very hard on a brand new support and ticketing system for all our customers.

DOCman 2.0

The work on DOCman 1.6 and the introduction of the Member Club and Center have made us push the planned DOCman 2.0 release back. Initially as first beta release was planned for the end of Q2 2011. We are not able to meet that milestone.

Progress on DOCman 2.0 has been steady however. Previews have been made in Germany and Brazil. Another sneak preview is scheduled on the Joomladay Bangkok in October and Joomladay Sydney in November.

While DOCman 2.0 isn’t quite ready yet for beta, a lot of work has been done on the various separate features (logging, file management, notifications, …) which together will make up the functionality of DOCman 2.0.

In a next step we will make those features available to you as separate Joomla components, more on this on our next blog post.

  • http://twitter.com/Christoph_web Christoph Kühnl

    Any Idea when it´s ready?

  • http://johan.janssens.me Johan Janssens

    Hi Christoph, we are working as hard as we can. DOCman 2 will still take a while to complete. Good progress has been made on a lot of the required features. Instead of waiting until it’s all done, we have decided to release the features that have been completed through separate components. More news on that in a next post.

  • http://youjustgetme.com/index.php?page=view_profile&id=87713 Robin Nelson

    Outstanding article over again! I am impatient for your next post.

  • http://telaran.myopenid.com/ Telaran

    So at the moment we getting as usual the “we’re working on it” statement mixed with “lot of features”- promises.

    And yes it was really important to take all the effort in changing the old payment system to a membership… no comment

    I’m still missing a real list of feature of the 2.0, a roadmap and/or published Videos/Files of the mentioned sneak preview’s. If you want annually payments, you have to make a roadmap!There was a time I really liked and loved Docman but now I really have to look for another solution.

  • http://johan.janssens.me Johan Janssens

    Thanks for the feedback. It’s very much appreciated. We are doing the best we can and have been failing a little bit to communicate about DOCman 2.0 Will try to do better on that.

    As for the feature list of DOCman 2.0. You can find features that are being worked on or are in review on our ideas tracker : http://ideas.joomlatools.eu/forums/10697-docman/topics/10697-i-suggest-you-/filter/accepted
    We also added comments to features that are being worked on to explain what the exact implementation will look like. Hope this helps to give an idea. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001216051621 Rick Stoffiere

    I share Telaran’s feelings completely.  There was simply NO better document manager for Joomla 1.5.  I am in desperate need of a robust solution for Joomla 1.7, but the waiting period on this seems outrageous.  The alternatives are not worth the time, yet development of DOCMan seems to be shrouded in mystery.  All we seem to get are vague notions of how wesome 2.0 will be, but we are still left waiting.

    I have paid for DOCMan in the past.  I am glad to see the implementation of the member system (although I fail to see how this and the Center took precedence over DOCMan itself), and I have NO issue paying for exceptional extensions.  At this point in time, however, I have absolutely no comfort that you guys will deliver 2.0 in the next 12 months, so what impetus is there for me to pay now?

  • http://johan.janssens.me Johan Janssens

    Hi Rick, thanks for the feedback. To answer your questions :

    - I can re-assure you that development of DOCman 2.0 is well under way. Writing great software takes time. We don’t want to settle for anything less then that.

    - The member center and the switch to the new subscription system was a needed step to allow us to release  and support more then one extension. 

    If you feel that DOCman 2.0 will not be delivered in the next 12 months then you are free to wait until we have deserved your trust it will be. We are definitely up for the challenge. 

    We just released a blog post with an update about the progress we are making and the announcement of two new extensions FILEman and LOGman. Here is the link : http://blog.joomlatools.eu/2011/11/meet-fileman-and-logman.html

    Keep the feedback coming.

  • http://johan.janssens.me Johan Janssens

    Good news : http://blog.joomlatools.eu/2011/11/meet-fileman-and-logman.html 

    In a follow up blog post we will do a detailed feature overview of FILEman and LOGman and how this fits into the bigger picture for DOCman 2.0.

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