What's in store for BluApple?

The release of Coldfusion 9 and it's new built in Hibernate ORM, I have decided to do a major rewrite of bluApple. I know bluApple has not been released for very long, but I had been using it for quite some time. Although it is already very simplistic, once you know the in's and out's, I have found that it was lacking in a couple area's that I have been meaning to improve on. One of the major upgrades that I had been meaning to do was give bluApple a solid API. Although some sort of API already existed. It was not very standard and I had been working on some ideas for it.

I started to realize that, instead of releasing a bunch of modules for bluApple that I should wait on that until I release bluApple 3.

So what's going to be new?

1> NEW API: A real API that can be extended. I have been researching the best ways to implement this and I have also taken into considerations some of the stronger frameworks out there such as coldbox and I have come up with a plan to implement a strong API that can be extended well beyond the current bluApple capabilities.

2> NO REQUIREMENT FOR ISIAPI_REWRITE: For those that have downloaded and installed bluApple, I'm sure you all have already wished that it was independant of ISIAPI_REWRITE. This is also a main focus. This should allow you to have a more user friendly install of bluApple and be compatable with more platforms. ISIAPI will now become an "optional" feature.

3> NEW ADMIN SYSTEM: With bluApple2, I found it irritating that I had to tweak the Admin interface when dealing with darker backgrounds. This was not ment to happen and I never got around to fixing it. bluApple already had a pretty strong theming system. The plan here is to clean up the Admin section. The admin section will be more user friendly and made compatable with any theme created with bluApple.

4> IMPROVED THEMEING: I will be creating a theme builder within bluApple to allow you to easily create themes for your bluApple site.

5> TRUE OPEN SOURCE: Up until now, no contributions to bluApple have been accepted. I am planning on using an SVN for bluApple so that the community can contribute.

For those that were waiting for some of the promised modules, you will be pleased about the following.

1> Built in Blogging module. It is the way of the web, now a website is nothing without a blog, so a blogging engine will be built into bluapple. This just might be BlogCFC but I have to talk to Ray about it first.

2> Built in Forum module. As with blogging, this is a must have feature in which will be enabled or disabled from the admin section.

3> Dynamic Menu Module: A customizeable CSS driven menu system will be integrated into bluApple

That is all I got for now, Look for bluApple 3 to be released fairly soon!