One week until 1.8.6 stable

Regular readers will start to think that I like giving delays that I cannot respect. To be on the *safe* side, I'd like them to know that customers always have priority over the software, which gives me a good excuse to be late on delivering the public version of Dokeos 1.8.6 :-) Alternatively, customers are the ones investing into Dokeos and allowing us to develop a great product. So thank you, dear customer. We've worked hard to show our respect to you and your respect to our community. This article is just a quick teaser to let you all know that, this week, we are preparing Dokeos 1.8.6 stable. In fact, we just released Dokeos 1.8.6 RC2, which should be our last release before the stable. With about 28 minor bugs still present as I write, we've pretty much closed or worked on 1400 tasks since Dokeos 1.8.5, with more than 5000 hours worked on the product on my side (I know Arnaud can probably add a good 500 around there, and Ivan and Juan Carlos have probably contributed for about 250 hours each as well - thank you for that guys, you (and others) gave us a great look at what an active community can be!). This amount is more than any previous version of Dokeos (the first release of the 1.8.x series was a very active one as well). The charted comparison on Ohloh.net remains as a witness of this massive effort. During the coming days, I will be

• checking and cleaning the code and the interfaces to release an excellent package
• preparing the announcements for the stable version
• preparing mass events to show it
• checking with translators if everything is alright for them (Ivan has gone crazy with UTF-8 support this week-end so there's a good chance with might have that as well)
• trying to put some automated tests to run on a public server
• checking possible security issues
• controlling the work of the latino team
• communicating with many people to prepare for Dokeos Users Day America 2009! (anybody wants to get invited to Peru to talk about Dokeos?)

There's a lot of parallel stuff as well (I'm starting to teach two PHP courses at the same time in about 10 days and I have a few speeches to prepare as well) but all in all I think it should start to be easier (for me) in July... Thanks for reading, see you around!