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Call for developers/sponsors

Monday, 28 November 2005, 17:36
Category: ZNF

The ZNF project continues growing very fast, lots of people are starting to use it also for their business. Now we need your help...

We are having a lot of feedback from the community, and we thank again all the people that spent their time to send us bug signals, bug fixes, translations or even simply suggestions.

With all this feedback we have good plans for the features to introduce/improve in the framework, in particular we want to do, in order of priority and before the 1.0 release:

move the packaging system to PEAR 1.4 (use of PEAR_PackageFileManagerv2) * in progress *
move the packaging distribution to PEAR 1.4 channels (use of PEAR_Server) * in progress *
add declarative authentication configuration * just started *
add ZNF_Business_PDO helper class * just started *
fix problems with XML translation files and characters encoding
add ZNF_BeanUtils_BeanUtils class to provide automatic loading of GET/POST variables in ZNF_Action_ActionForms classes
improve exception handling in ZNF_Action_RequestProcessor class (possible use of PEAR_Exception)
improve the locale handling in ZNF class (possible use of PEAR_I18nv2)
add Apache's mod_rewrite rules to have user friendly URLs (similar to DokuWiki)
add unit tests (use of PhpUnit2)
improve the znf-news demo

As future/parallel works we would like to:

add translations of the site/documentation
integrate AJAX helper classes (possible use of HTML_AJAX)
integrate a native PHP5 template engine (possible use of Savant3)

This is an official call for developers. The work to do is a lot, as you see we already started to work on some features, but we need new developers to speedup the other jobs. If you are already using ZNF, you are experienced enough with it and with PHP5 and you want to become an official developer is the time to act. :) At the moment the feature to be developed are the one listed above and it would be nice if some of the actual contributors will take in charge at least one of it. We'll give direct access to svn after a little period of evaluation of the code.

We would like to do also a call for sponsors. The project has received no donations since it started. If you like ZNF and especially if you're using it in your business you can think about making a donation, it would be very appreciated. :) We never wanted to introduce in the site ad banners of notorious search engines, we would prefer instead to have some official "sponsor" that could give us some financial/material support. If you have proposals for us just leave us a private e-mail.