October 2014 to March 2015 – Finalizing Core Rework¶

We’ve had a number of pushes throughout the last years to finish the core rework we started in 2011 (omg). However – while it always felt like we were almost done we never managed to finish it.

Now we’ve been pushing forward again with azul working on crabgrass for the last 6 month. And it looks like we will migrate to the new version of crabgrass within the next week! (April 2015)

April 2015 to September 2015 – Preguntando Caminamos¶

With the new release out the main question will be – How does it work for you? Does it help you creating the social change you want to bring about?

The last round of development was made possible by a collective effort of people who are using crabgrass and want to make it easier to use for themselves and others. Lot’s of people helped with testing, documentation and translations. And throughout this process we started to discuss and learn from each other. Let’s continue this conversation.

User Interface tweaks¶

The new user interface can still be made a lot clearer and explained better. We’re happy to finally go live but in the testing process there were already lot’s of proposals for improvements. Many of them are easy to implement and make live a lot easier. So one focus for the next round of development will be to round off those edges and improve clearity, documentation and translations.

Sustaining Crabgrass¶

We.riseup.net has been running for as much as 8 years now. And it’s use is still growing . In order to enable that in the future we also need to clean up a bit.
What about the users that signed up in the beginning but have not logged in in the last five years. We’ll probably send them a reminder and then remove their accounts and the data.
What about your old groups? Maybe it’s time for a spring cleaning.
The best data protection is not storing the data at all. So let’s clean up some. That will also help us free some space on the harddrive – which is almost full.

Crabgrass is build on top of ruby on rails – a fast moving web development ecosystem. This year rails5 is about to be released and we just moved to rails 3.2 – which will receive no security updates from this summer on anymore. So it’s time to move on. rails 4.2 is the goal for this round of development.

Moving forward¶

With the core rework we have a solid basis and a good starting point to finally bring some new features to we.riseup.net. Which we will work on first is yet to be determined. But a calendar has often been asked for and also was on the top of the new feature wish lists in the user feedback group. We’ll start with new votes to see what you all really want and then take it from there.