When I thought I would have to abandon the J!Research project, the calendar gave me a couple of free weeks and thanks to the magic of Christmas I could restart my work in the project. J!Research had been frozen since September 2014 when I announced the version 2.1.3 for Joomla! 2.5.x. The present is Joomla! 3.3.x LTS and we could not stay behind. For this reason and after a significant amount of work, I am announcing the release of J!Research 3.0 Beta 1, the first version of J!Research compatible with the Joomla! 3.3.x series. I am not kidding when I say that this is a very buggy release. This version is only aimed to officially start the way towards a fully functional management solution for Joomla! 3.3.x. But do not get me wrong, the available installation package delivers the basic functionalities of J!Research: managenement of publications, research areas and staff members and you can see it running in my personal website. From now until the release of J!Research 3.0 Stable, our roadmap will consist of a short cycle development with multiple beta releases:

while(!stable_enough($jresearch)) {
    while(busy_with_life($luis));
    $jresearch = fix_a_couple_of_bugs($jresearch);
    while(busy_with_life($luis));
    $jresearch = add_a_feature($jresearch);
    release($jresearch);
}
release_stable($jresearch);


This happens because, in contrast to my current motivation, my time resources are limited. Here a list of the new features of J!Research 3.0, its known bugs and missing functionalities. The order is arbitrary, so it does not reflect any sort of priority.

New features

• Renewed controls for the linkage of authors to publications.
• Better management of attachments and links for publications.
• Support for keywords. This includes search by keywords using the Joomla! search plugin

Known Bugs

• Edition of publications and profiles in frontend is broken
• Client side validation in publications form is broken.
• Plugins for citation of publications have not been properly tested and are likely broken.
• Management of projects still not migrated to Joomla! 3.x.
• ACL and permissions have not been tested (likely broken).
• The search plugin works only for publications.

Planned functionalities

• Automatic updates. Joomla! 3.x offers native support for automatic updates and we want to exploit this feature. (J!Research 3.0)
• Multilingual support.
• Spanish and German translations.
• Integration with the sh404SEF extension for advanced user-friendly URLs.
• Support for teams. This feature was present in the 1.x series and we are considering to implement it (J!Research 3.1).
• Support for project financiers. This feature was present in the 1.x series and we are considering to implement it in a more simplistic way (J!Research 3.1).
• Support for RDF (J!Research 3.1 or 3.2)

Officially removed functionalities

• Support for facilities.
• Support for cooperations.

Recall that I am not announcing any dates for the next releases. The only sure thing is that the next release will be J!Research 3.0 Beta 2 ;-), probably by the end of January 2015.