Hi, our beloved wpDataTables users 🙂 Today I would like to publish a brief plan/schedule of plugin development for the end of 2014, so you would know what awaits you in nearby future.
Main priority is to keep users of the plugin satisfied, and obtain new users of course – which, in general, means regular patching & bugfixing the software, developing new features, and providing support to the clients. Combining these is getting harder over time since the software grows, client base grows as well, and support starts consuming even more time then development; so here’s a short plan on what will be introduced and why sometimes during this time it can take some time to answer the support requests (I do understand that sometimes you have to wait on urgent matters, and I apologize about it). Of course, the plan is approximate, and the dates may change because quality is always more important then speed:
- End of september: update of the documentation PDF to make it up-to-date with 1.5.3 version of the plugin. Patch of the new version if some issues will be found by users (that happens frequently with new releases of the software).
- Beginning of october – middle of october hiring a developer for support matters. I tried to cooperate with freelancers on that in past but it didn’t go so well; apparently support requires somebody who will be constantly available; organizing a workplace and official employment of support manager will be necessary, which is time consuming of course.
- Middle of october launch of support ticket system and support timetable. Not really sure on how this will go yet, since Envato plans to port all support to their internal system; but for now we will launch it on wpdatatables.com and see how it goes. By timetable I mean that most probably support manager will handle the support requests from 10 to 17 CET, but each request is individual, so we cannot tell how long it will take each individual request to be addressed. Also it will mean that there will be no support here in comments any more – users will be redirected to the support system.
- Middle of october – end of october – global update of structure and content of wpdatatables.com – along with the support system mentioned in previous point, it will be updated to contain interactive documentation and contain up-to-date examples and demos; also a searchable FAQ, etc.
- Beginning of november – middle of november – finishing and publishing the version 1.6 of the plugin. Main features which were announced for a while already will be:
- Table constructor: three main features – 1) Manual table generation and back-end input; 2) WP content visual table constructor; 3) MySQL data visual query builder.
- Auto-update functionality for plugin
- Datetime column type
- Currency / percentage column type
- Support for Google Docs as data source
- Totals for columns
- Upgrades for charts functionality. HighCharts support.
- Auto-generation of thumbnails on image attachment upload for editable tables.
- Middle of november – end of november – fliming and publishing a complete video course – a set of video tutorials based on the documentation.
The points are interdependent, and if e.g. finding and hiring a support manager takes longer then I plan, the development of version 1.6 will also take longer, so as I mentioned plan is approximate – but one way or another that’s in brief what awaits plugin users in nearby future 🙂
Thank you for using the plugin!
