certainly not before the beginning of the year… lots to do… the plugin api is in place and we have converted a bunch of core stuff to plugins – more to do… when andy gets back from vacation, we will begin working the templating stuff… those are two of the primary goals…
will be lengthy alpha and beta testing too…
no, probably not… well, certainly upgrades will be there, but will be more involved for the first upgrade to 5.x…
Still formlating how that will work, but upgrading to 5.0 will likely require an upgrade to the latest SP version (currently 4.3.4) before you can upgrade to 5.0… lot of underlying reasons, but we will try to make it as painless as possible…
but more importantly, a lot of core functionality is being moved to plugins. So, if you still want that functionality, you will need to add some plugins too… they will use existing data however. AND depending upon the final implementation of templating, users may want to do some work on their templates. We will of course provide a few standard templates to begin with. think of templates being more like a wp theme than the current skin method.
Will you release alpha/beta releases as you go, so we can prepare the foru/templates for production enviroments
That’s the plan but believe me – it’s quite a long way off. 5 will be a major, major reworking.