Oxwall 2015

Hey everybody,

The year is off to a fast start, and January is already past without you realizing it. So it’s high time we shared our plans for 2015.

Before, let’s talk about our priorities. We have to choose wisely where to apply our effort, and here’s how we look at it. There are things that can grow to take care of themselves in the community (like any particular plugins, themes, translations and utilities) and those that require our full attention (like general direction, standards and critical platform functionality). Thus, for the next big iteration of the product (and the project) we identified key directions and objectives for this year.

CMS, interface changes

Content management has always been an underdeveloped part of Oxwall. We’ve been busy with making Oxwall better in social aspects (it’s a social network product after all), but because of that some basic tools that any website requires (like CMS) went overlooked. Having received fair criticism for that, we’ve developed our vision for content management in Oxwall’s next iteration. Together with that we refine existing interfaces and rethink some basic assumptions in the product, and how they match real life usage patterns.

This is going to be a series of releases spreading the new paradigm across the product and leaving plenty of time for user and developer adoption. Details will be gradually introduced in our Dev Diary column and beta release announcements.

Mobile

Pocket version of Oxwall has been around for some time but it still lacks important features. We will be working on that front since a lot of people now use phones instead of desktops/tablets, even if Oxwall is not especially accommodating for that. We laid solid foundation for the small screen version of Oxwall but haven’t been active on feature development side yet. This will change.

To reiterate, we think that the “pocket” version of Oxwall (the one adapted for phones) differs from the desktop/tablet primarily by usage patterns, let alone obvious input/output characteristics. That’s why we made a decision to essentially build two products instead of one, so now we have to catch up in the mobile part.

Documentation, test coverage

More news coming to the Oxwall developers camp. This year we finally start covering code with tests and we’ll be working on better documentation. Right now third party developers mostly rely on the existing plugins to build their own ones. To create systematic approach to developing plugins we have to step up our game in the essential technical aspects. These works are to be launched together with the new development cycle.

All in all, we are looking into a very busy year of creating value for users and grow Oxwall as the product and the project. Although we are a small team and our capabilities are limited, we expect 2015 to be the year of making the biggest difference for users in a long time. Thanks for creating with us!

Oxwall team

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12 thoughts on “Oxwall 2015

  1. Thank you for the announcement, As at yesterday I was discussing with a developer to move my site from Oxwall as the oxwall for mobile is very discouraging and about 99.1% of my site visitors use their mobile.

    With this new announcement i am well assured that something good is on its way for our users.

    Keep up the good work.

  2. I mostly liked the last part of this blog.By the time you get this done,this will become one of the best “hidden!” feature in Oxwall
    I believe if you focused on developers(to provide a well-structure documentation), we would see a totally different Oxwall today
    but now is better than never, right?
    Now that you decided to provide this for developers, I expect team to do it RIGHT

    Cheers

  3. should be given priority in the news feed is unacceptable not work very fast and not to have to change page to see what is announced and to distinguish friends to the news feed not all members only friend

  4. Excellent, all parts of this post where exciting. Love that mobile is going to see some love and it’s just as good dev’s are getting more concise documentation. all this leads to more progress for oxwall.

    Im pleased to see oxwall is going places, not that i was ever in doubt. this is just another of many triumphs from oxwall software.

  5. Having recently become addicted to Oxwall I am pleased to see the ongoing development and interest in this platform. I was with a different CMS for many years but was displeased with the direction they took in their latest upgrades. I hope to stay with Oxwall for quite some time to come. I am new with this system but eager to learn all I can so that perhaps one day I will in turn be more able to help someone else who may be new with your system.

  6. Most waited post, but after all, oxwall is really going forward in the areas it lacked before….
    But great news from dev camp…
    Hope 2015 turns out to be a great year to oxwall software and its community 🙂

  7. Great work team, hope there will be improvement in the mobile interface as most people are using mobile phones today in their day to day browsing needs.
    Nice software.

  8. We cant say it to much but often to it to little:

    Great work! Really love the platform and how it is developed. recently had a discussion with one of my friends who is in my opinion a superb developer and he really like the coding.

    Looking forward to all the new features and development.

    //Dirk

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