So word on the development front has fallen quiet, but it’s still going on. When I sat down to work on the roadmap that’s driving SMS 2, I knew that this release was going to be the toughest. At this point, there’s at least a dozen changes on every pages; some pages are having large chunks rewritten, so it’s slow going. The worst part about the work is that it’s tedious work and very repetitive at this point. Once this stage is done, it’ll be a relief to move on to another challenge, but until then, work continues.

For an average “major” release (a.k.a. a point release), we usually toss things into beta for a few days to make sure I haven’t completely torqued something to death. Sometimes even after releasing, it’s clear that I’ve torqued something to hard or not enough and we have to do a minor update. It happens. I beat myself up over it for a few days with the initial launch of SMS 2 and when I had to release 2.0.1 within 48 hours. That’s just the way that this stuff works. You test it as best you can then let your user base find the other bugs and patch ‘em quick. It’s worked so far. SMS 2.5 is a bit different in that respect. While 2.1 and 2.2. and 2.3 and 2.4 were major updates that brought significant changes, none of them were as sweeping as 2.5 will be. The testing process is a lot more strenuous this time around.

SMS 2.5 will introduce a handful of new features, the first being a brand new user access control system that’ll allow site admins to actually set which pages their players can and cannot see. It’ll be nice for that CO who wants their XO to do something a little more than what the current XO powers allow, or for keeping a tighter leash on a trouble player by not letting them get into other things. This is the hardest step of the process as it requires nearly every page to have parts rewritten to take this into account. On top of that, more people have been having formatting issues, so to fix that, every inline comment in the system has to be converted to another format. Truth be told, that’s the roughest part, but it needs to be done. In addition, SMS 2.5 will finally let site admins control the menus throughout SMS through the control panel. It won’t be as robust as the system in SMS 3, but it’ll do what it needs to for now. Lots of good stuff.

As I mentioned earlier, the testing for SMS 2.5 is different, which is part of what will end up slowing down the release. Here’s the outline to give you an idea of what the testing is like for this release:

• Beta 1 – this version will focus on the new user access control system. Obviously this is where a lot of the most intensive testing will happen since we don’t want people being shut out of their SMS installation.
• Beta 2 – this version will focus on the new changes to building the menus out of the database and will fix any issues that are unearthed in beta 1. We’ll introduce the rank and skin catalogues into this version where site admins will be able to activate, deactive, and set skins/ranks as being in development. It’s a more robust system than what we have in place now.
• Release Candidate – this version will fix the bugs from beta 2 as well as add some final polish to the release. I’ve been working on redoing the skins. SMS 2.5 will ship with 3 new skins (a reduction by 2 of what SMS currently ships with) and 2 rank sets (a reduction by 1 of what SMS currently ships with).

All in all, this should be a really exciting release for Anodyne, and we’re working hard to deliver it, but it’ll be a little longer. In the end, it’ll be worth the wait though!

The title seemed appropriate considering that the first thing anyone learns to do in web-based programming is a “hello world” page.  This is the Anodyne Development blog.  I’ve been thinking about doing this for a few weeks now because I don’t want to clutter up the forums with lots of superfluous stuff.  This is just a place for us to kick back and share our thoughts on the future of SMS and what we’re doing to make things better.  As we expand our product offerings, this’ll be a place to find out more about the development of those products as well.  So grab a chair, kick back, and enjoy!