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Locomotive status
First of all, I would to thank all of you who sent us very kind and encouraging messages, helped us to fix issues (a lot, let’s face the truth !) or developed new features. Actually, we were not expecting such a positive wave. For instance, the Locomotive back-office has been translated in German (thanks Bernd !), French and Brazilian Portuguese (thanks Raphael !). Believe me, it is always a great moment when you see your app in another language.
More than that, some companies adopted Locomotive on a daily basis. The Frontier Group, a web design and development company, built many websites powered by our engine. The feedbacks given by 3 of their employees (Dirk, Mario and Karl) were tremendous helpful for our CMS. They did an amazing job by fixing a lot of issues and answering questions from the community.
I also could name John, Bernd, Raphael, Benjamin for their great help. I hope actually I don’t forget someone :-)
By the way, folks, if you built a site with Locomotive and you want to show proudly your work, send us an email, we will feature you on our blog (+ twitter as well).
Will there be a roadmap ?
I don’t think so. At first, I tried to release specific versions of the Locomotive gem. But, pretty quickly, it seemed clear to me that it does make any sense since, unfortunately, there still were bugs to be fixed the day after, making the release quickly outdated. That is mainly because Locomotive is still a young project.
Anyway, I keep up-to-date a todo list for tasks / issues / new features. Let me share the main ones with you. By the way, the order does not reflect the priority:
- documentation. [UPDATE] documentation about the liquid syntax is coming soon.
- duostack version. LocomotiveCMS should work with both Heroku and Duostack only by specifying it in the locomotive.rb config file.
- associations in the custom content types. simple at the beginning: belongs_to/has_many
- internationalization. Pages, content types, assets have a different version depending on the locale (specified in the url or the domain).
- enhancement of the inline editing module. Uploading images is not implemented for now for instance, …etc.
- a better way to install locomotive in a mono-site mode.
- dynamic image resizing. Only by using a special liquid tag, the image (images from asset collections and content types) will be resized. {{ ‘foo.png’ | transform: ‘500x400#’ | image_tag }}. Varnish + Rack.
- moving all the Locomotive models into a brand new namespace. (Locomotive::Site, Locomotive::Page, …etc). Crucial for a better integration in another Rails app.
- convert css into scss.
- integration with an existing rails app. I wish Locomotive could be used as the cms module of any Rails app.
As you can see, nothing major (except for the “Internationalization”) because I am following the same rules I apply since the beginning. Keep the core as simple / light as possible and refine / refactor as often as possible. Besides, I pay attention to the delivered code, or at least I try to.
My mojo ? The development of new features should be only driven by the need of them.
Want to contribute ?
A lot of people asked me what was the best way to contribute to the project and how they could help. My answer is quite simple. Use Locomotive for your websites for real !!! If you need a feature or if you run into a bug, fork the project, fix or implement and then submit your pull request on github.
Anyway, again, thanks to all of you who were enough patient to check Locomotive despite the bugs and saw its great potential !
What’s next ?
It seems that some people get worried about the durability of LocomotiveCMS which is, in my point of view, a very pertinent question.
First, as I mentioned it at the beginning of the post, a lot of companies are using Locomotive meaning that you will always find someone who can help you.
Then and that’s the beauty of the open source, you are not an hostage of a product. I mean, the code is clear and can be easily modified.
Lastly, things are moving fast for Locomotive and we are going to announce some big news in the next weeks. I will talk more about it in my next post.
choo-choo :-)
