On Apr 10, 2007, at 2:26 PM, Rob Taylor wrote:

For those of us who contributed to the fund drive, I think it is reasonable to ask for a little more than a wild guess

You have a good point And I feel pretty horrible about having it
take so long

How do we make this a priority? More development money? With a firm deliverable date we would be willing to contribute more It is obviously a very big project

I'm sort of in a tight spot, since I'd rather not ask for any more
money, without having something to show for the current fund drive -
not that there hasn't been any work towards it, it's just all been,
"under the hood" and that's not very exciting The only sort of
funding I'd probably accept is private funding - not another public
fundraising drive

That is a problem I've been currently been facing - how to make it
a priority Right now, there's, just in the development of Dada Mail,
a few things I still have to do -

First is to make sure the program's bugs are fixed and any security
problems are dealt with If you want to see what's currently open in
the 2 10 13 release, check out:

https://sourceforge
net/tracker/?group_id=13002&atid=113002

There's about 10 bugs currently for just that release

There's a whole bunch of things that people can do to help with that
- namely, if you discover something - anything that's wrong with the
program, file it as a bug If it doesn't get filed, I never know
about it Honestly

The second is getting existing features working better For example,
the current moderation system for Dada Mail is severely broken - it's
one of the reasons why messages take so long to appear from this
group There's also everyone's favorite pet project ;) (whatever that
is) that they want worked on I've put a list together of a few (if
there are any others, let me know):

http://mojo
skazat
com/support/documentation/projects
pod
html

Currently, I mostly do such projects for private commissions, since
they're a lot of work to do for free ;) But, usually I still have to
massage the feature and flesh it out so it's ready for public
consumption One example of that is the new queueing feature - the
next feature release of Dada Mail will allow you to say how many
mailouts you can have at one time - which is great! and will solve a
lot of problems The rub is, it's not totally complete, but the
sponsor of the feature is satisfied I still need to complete it out,
test it out, etc It's a killer feature though, and we'll be
wondering how we all lived without it

Some of these features did take a higher priority than the multiple
fields feature, for example the whole new sending monitor feature
Basically, a majority - a majority of mailouts of Dada Mail
installs on shared hosts weren't completing It made sense to make
sure they would, before moving on It was a difficult feature to put
in, but now it's in, it's greatly beneficial

Another "feature", although not as glamorous is the start of the
automated testing suite I don't know how I could make such a drastic
feature without it, now that it's in place The Sending Monitor stuff
wouldn't have been possible either, honestly That's an ongoing
project in of itself

Thankfully, these two things (bug fixes and new features) are in
different branches in the code repository, so I'm not waiting for a
feature to be completed before releasing a bug fixing release, as I
used to (bone-headedly)

The same will probably be done for the multiple fields, so we won't
all have to wait for multiple fields to be done to get, say, the new
mailout queueing feature This alone will help things happen faster
This was a huge problem before, since I never was working on more
than one branch at one time Now that I understand how, I can work on
as many branches as I want at one time

Anyways, back to you and Mariano's question of delivery date -
probably time to start setting deadlines since, if none are ever set,
time to set one

So, hopefully, I want to release a new alpha of 2 11 by next week (if
not sooner) This release will have some new features I've been
alluding too in past posts, as well as a blueprint of what needs to
get done to get multiple fields in the program, as well as some docs
on how to sync Dada Mail with Anything Sync'ing Dada Mail with
Anything is, itself a Killer Feature, since Dada Mail will never,
ever be as feature rich in the content management side of things as
something like Joomla (and conversely, Joomla will probably never be
as feature rich in the mailing list department as Dada Mail)