Whew. Thanks for all your suggestions! Below is the roadmap for Q2A 1.5, in no particular order.
Major features:
- Ajax-based commenting and answering.
- Closing questions as duplicates, or for other reasons.
- Optional moderation mode for questions, answers and comments.
- More advanced private messaging (message store).
- Users can favorite questions, users, tags and categories.
- Personalized news feed for users showing updates on their favorite items and relating to their posts.
Minor features:
- Admin can send email to all members.
- Deleting users completely.
- Option to send emails via SMTP.
- Option for 'unanswered' to show questions with no upvoted answers.
- Separate permissions for up and down voting.
- Limit account creation rate per IP address.
- Answer list pagination.
- Admin can assign bonus/penalty points to a user.
- Separate permission for changing tag or category of a question.
- Custom field on question forms.
- Better dates for older posts.
- Allow custom pages and links to have minimum permission level.
- Optional custom explanatory HTML to display to users asking a question, answering a question, or registering.
Developer features:
- New "filter" module type allowing user-entered input to be validated or modified by plugins.
- New "search" module type allowing plugins to implement their own content indexing and searching algorithms.
- Translation support for plugins.
- Update detection for themes and plugins.
- Database tables for meta information on posts, users, categories and tags.
- General mechanism for on-site notifications.
- Pass more useful contextual information to theme functions.
- A select list of pluggable functions that can be replaced by plugins.
Each feature in this list was chosen based on several considerations:
- How many people asked for it. Obviously, the more, the better.
- How easy it would be to implement as a plugin. If it's easy (or indeed has already been done) it needn't necessarily be in the core.
- How much it will help plugin developers in future. As Q2A matures, there is more focus on its development as a platform, rather than just a product. The goal is to make it as extensible as possible.
Please note that there is no guarantee that all of the above features will make it into the release, which is scheduled to enter beta in late December.
As several have requested, Q2A will also be available on GitHub, starting with the beta of version 1.5. The primary purposes of this are to:
- Enable bug fixes to be submitted by the community.
- Allow users to maintain private branches of the core code, so that their changes are easy to merge into Q2A updates.
However, Q2A 1.5 will not yet be opened to general community development. I would like to personally ensure that the Q2A core remains small, fast and secure, so that anyone installing it can feel confident that it will run efficiently and safely on their site. I feel it's important to avoid the issues seen by projects like WordPress, which has suffered a number of major security issues over the years, despite its outstanding developer community. I'm sorry if this decision frustrates some people - please consider whether you can achieve the same goal using a plugin.
Thanks again for all of the community input into this feature list - off to work!
