Quarterly report (Q4 2013) « The official site of Mibew Messenger project

Preamble

It’s been three months since the publication of the previous quarterly report, so now it is time to release another one.

The good

The project is developing in accordance with the roadmap.

We continue to fix bugs and security issues in Mibew Messenger 1.6.x and doing our best to create Mibew Messenger 2.0.

In the last three months there were two releases of Mibew Messenger of the stable branch (the current version was released last week). For now we plan to behave that way, releasing a new version of Mibew Messenger of the stable branch every two months. Though it could change once Mibew Messenger 2.0 will be released.

As of Mibew Messenger 2.x, we made some serious decisions that will define the direction of the future development of Mibew.

First of all, we’re looking for reliable, lightweight, simple and fast server-side template processor and the search is almost complete. For now we made a preliminar decision, but it’s too early to announce it. Just wait for awhile.

At the same time, we’ve already changed the code of Mibew in the way that make it possible to switch to almost any template processor. If anything will go wrong it will be possible to revise our initial decision. So, there is nothing to worry about.

Then, we decide to implement the PSR standards (PSR-0, PSR-1, and PSR-2 to be exact), thus making the code much more readable. We plan to publish the guidelines for coding style in the next month or two, after we finish the ongoing process of refining of the existing code. It will be based on the PSR with several additional conditions.

Besides the major development decisions and the ongoing work over the code of Mibew there were some achievements in the internationalization area. Mibew Messenger was translated to Japanese, so for now the overall number of localizations is 35. Also Chinese translations (both Traditional and Simplified) were updated and improved.

The bad

We still have a lot of things to do before the first alpha-version of Mibew Messenger 2.0 will arrive. For now, we hope (and will try to make it real) that it will happen in two months. At the same time one should understand that we don’t want to sacrifice the quality of the product in the name of development rate. So, please be patient. Soon we’ll finish the first part of major changes so it will be possible for third-party developers to participate in the development process.

Actually, it’s the only bad thing. Everything else goes on just as planned.

The miscellanea

Finally, some statistics.

The Mibew project has 89 forks of the main repository on Github hosting (14 new forks for the last three months). It has earned stars from 51 users (28 new stars for the last three months) and is watched by 24 developers (10 new watchers for the last three months). The overall number of commits into the master branch of the main repository will soon exceed 1300 (about 100 new commits for the last three months, not to mention the commits into the secondary repositories and into the legacy branch).

The average number of downloads of different Mibew distributions is still about 2 thousands per week, this number is pretty much stable. The largest number of downloads made from Russia (17.42%) and Brazil (14.92%). Followed with some margin by downloads made from Turkey (5.49%), China (4.82%), USA (4.80%), India (4.02%), and Ukraine (3.94%).

The users’ activity on the project’s forum has slightly decreased compared to the same values of the previous quarter. Now there is an average from 1 to 2 new topics every two days, and from 2 to 3 new posts every day. At the same time users started to more actively make use of Github’s interfaces for tracking of issues and bugs. So everything is fine.

Every day (not counting the 1st of January) the site of the project is visited by more than one thousand people and that number is pretty much stable too.