Towards a version 1 and beyond

This module has been in alpha a long time. The reason for that is I've been following the "release early, release often" philosophy. By making the module public from the start I've gotten feedback and help and it's made the module better than it would have been if I had been working in isolation. The downside is that it's been in alpha a long time and will continue to be for a long time yet. I try very hard to make each alpha milestone as bug free and usable as possible but it doesn't make sense to do an official release until I feel the module is finished. I simply don't have the bandwidth to manage more branches so making a release and then branching to continue adding features is not an option.

So when will it be finished? That's hard to say. I have limited free time to work on this as no company is sponsoring it so I work on it here and there when I can. The following is the list of things I would like to accomplish. It may change over time as I learn about interesting features in other forum software but I have already done a lot of research and the changes to the list from this point should be minimal. Even so, I'm terrible about keeping lists like this up to date, so see the task list for the most up to date information.

#266682: Add forum statistics section
#219549: Add options for dealing with subforum display
#303568: Add option to set up forums
#303564: Add legend for icons
#303563: Clear readpath when marking all read
#303559: Add shortcut links
#303549: Clean up default user pane
#303548: Use imagecache for avis
#303545: Add announcement section
#303544: Add popup preview of topic
#303541: Add list of forum moderators
#210453: Add jump to forum dropdown
[#244492]
#250806: Bring back included post counts
#268429: Add topic list page for all forums
#269560: Hide drop down forum list from non admins
#271471: Add style with user pane on top
#268421: Make links on forum node consistant with comments where possible
#250112: Expand user points integration to allow for branding
#240176: Add pagination to top of forum topic

I also have some thoughts for improving the styles and adding more styles that haven't made it into issues. And, of course, there's the testing and bugfixing before I can call it 1.x ready. I'm also considering the possibility of adding tests but I haven't looked into automatic testing at all, yet.

Beyond the 1.x release, I have some more ideas. I haven't made these issues, yet, because they are so far off.

• Make all forum posts nodes. This one will take either changes to core or forking forum or both. You can read more about that here.
• Unified administration system. There are some modules such as forum access, comment mover, etc that are for administrating a forum but I'd like to see them pulled together into something that's on par with what stand alone forum software offers.
• Integration with panels. I don't plan on making AF dependent on panels but I'd like to offer an optional integration that gives users more control over layout of the entire forum page as well as possibly breaking the posts up into panels and adding panels into the post add/edit process.
• Giving back to core. Some of the things I do in AF I have to really jump thru hoops to get around core limitations. I'm hoping sometime before the code freeze to sit down and write patches to core forum that will make AF not have to work so hard. There's also a list of core forum issues that I am keepin an eye on.

Michelle