The Road to Ariadne 8.0

We've just released Ariadne 2.7.6 and barring major problems that will be the last release in the 2.7 series. Looking back on the last 10+ years of Ariadne development we've done a fairly good job of creating a stable platform that still continues to grow with new developments in PHP, HTML and Javascript. 

But throughout all this Ariadne has been at major version 2. This is because we said that we would only increment the major version number when we made a really backwards incompatible version of Ariadne. That has never happened, even with all of the major changes in architecture and two major versions of PHP - yes we started with PHP3 once a long time ago.

So we decided to keep that tradition and make it policy. We will not release a future version of Ariadne so incompatible with a previous version that we can't do an automatic upgrade. Therefor all Ariadne versions will forever be at major version 2 and we might as well skip it - the next version of Ariadne will be 8.0.

So what will this leap in versions bring you? We don't know for sure yet, but we pushed a number of intesting ideas up to the next major release for some time now, among them are:

  • Workspaces
    This will allow you to make many changes and then commit them all at once when you are ready. It will also enable a real editorial workflow and staging, without having to manage multiple copies of the same site.
  • PHP 5.3
    The next version will require PHP 5.3 as a minimum. This is in keeping with our policy to only upgrade the minimum required PHP version to that supported in the latest stable release of Debian Linux. This change allows us a chance to improve Ariadne's codebase immensely. You can take a look at an early part of that work at https://github.com/poef/Ariadne-Component-Library.
  • Project wizards and dashboard
    The new Project object type will come into its own with a wizard to easily create new projects based on existing ones or skeleton project build expressly for this purpose. In addition we'll add a dashboard view in Ariadne by default which will show all projects you have access to including the most important information about them.
  • Easy plugin system
    It has traditionally been difficult to install extensions in Ariadne, requiring a seperate site folder with copies or symbolic links to all the different parts of Ariadne and the extensions. We're now working on a plugin system which allows you to add, manage and remove extension from within Ariadne's user interface and even allowing you to add third party plugin repositories for use with Ariadne.
  • Improved user interface
    The developments around what people have been calling HTML5 the last few years have opened a lot of opportunities to build complex user interfaces. We'll be taking advantage of this to, among other things, add simpeler file management in Ariadne, from drag and drop file uploads to re-organizing content in Ariadne with simple operations on multiple objects and complete trees.