The weeks fly by and there never seems to be enough time in a day to get everything done I'd like to get done. But then the weekend comes and I get a chance to catch my breath ... and take a deeper look at my side projects. This has evolved into Saelos Sunday posts like this one. Things have been growing with Saelos and we are closer to a stable release than ever. As I have spent my nights and weekends on Saelos I have come to realize something. I'll share that revelation at the end of this post though...so stick around!
Let's jump right into what's happened in the last week in Saelos. I have some very exciting updates for you. There have been three major progress points and one very special mention to share this week. Let's look a bit more at each.
Translations
Okay, so this is the first and biggest announcement for this week's Saelos Sunday! We now have language translation capabilities in Saelos. That's right, all you polyglots capable of contributing to Mautic - you can now join in. We can't wait to have you step up and show off. Language translations was one of the biggest milestones still to accomplish before a stable release of Saelos so I am personally quite excited to have this completed.
Note: This is the underlying framework making language translations possible. This is not all of the translations. For that we need you!
Interested in helping? Join our Slack channels to find out how to get started.
Exports
The next feature I am excited to share this week is another one that's been frequently requested. Exporting information. The benefits of exporting data is an important one in an open source world. Your data is never locked in and you are in complete control of where it's used. Exports gives you the power to take data from a specific view.
Basic Reporting
The next feature from our checklist for a stable release was the ability to incorporate basic reporting. This is in our first iteration an expansion of the exporting functionality listed above. I won't go into too much detail here except to share that there will be more improvements to this feature in the weeks to come and I would love to see our community members who are interested in reporting step up and find ways to improve this feature.
Saelos Superstar
Lastly, there's an incredibly important person I'd like to recognize this week. One Saelos volunteer has been doing an enormous amount of work this week focusing on pushing things closer to a stable release.
Naomi C. Bush is this week's Saelos Superstar. She's contributed in a variety of ways...and I believe it's important to mention .. the majority of these contributions have not been directly code-related. That's right, Naomi is proof there are many, many valuable ways to volunteer in Saelos without necessarily writing code. Interested in learning more? She will be more than happy to share as she has demonstrated personally to me in the past. So join our Slack channel and ask!
Remaining Tasks
Now, that brings us finally to a review of our Stable release checklist and what remains to be done before we can release a stable version. The great news is this list gets shorter each week. I am very excited to say we are within reach of our goal!
- Languages and accessibility
- Inbound message handling
- View exporting (Reporting)
- Integration support
- Documentation
Count them with me! Only 3 remaining items before a stable release. We have come a long way and we are fast approaching the finish line. Naomi is focusing her attention on Documentation and I expect we'll see great things there very soon. She'd love your help I'm sure! The other two remaining tasks are more code-related so if you are so included just ask for more information and how you can best help.
Is this the week? It may be! That depends in part on you.
And finally, the realization I have come to and have begun to start to see evidenced in our growing Saelos community is the need for more volunteers capable of focusing their time and attention on Saelos. Naomi is the vocal proof of several things: First, people in our community are eager to see updates and consistent, dedicated improvements. Second, there are community people who want to be more involved and are capable of doing more.
We need more active contributors. We need to up the status of Saelos beyond just a weekend project into something greater. Our community is growing and eager to continue growing. We can no longer be a weekend project. We are fast becoming a substantial open source project and we require more focused attention. I'll be dedicating more of my time as well to what we have started to ensure we continue to grow as we should.
