My decision to hand over project maintenance of the Achievo project has turned out to be a good one.

Since Sandy took over, we've had 3 new releases. A first release candidate for Achievo 1.2 was out when he was at the helm hardly one month, and yesterday, he released Achievo 1.2.1, which contains several important bugfixes for the 1.2 branch.

I've had several remarks from users who were 'glad the project was apparently still alive after months without a release'. I think the project would've died prematurely if Sandy hadn't taken over.

As a result of the takeover, I was able to finally take the time to do some other things I've been planning to do for a while now. I've written a Typo3 ATK bridge that makes it possible to develop Typo3 backend modules in ATK. This reduces Typo3 backend modules from hundreds of lines of code to the minimal amount of coding we're used to from using ATK. This extension is currently being tested internally and will be released with a howto soon.

Also, I'm finishing up ATK 5.6. It contains some interesting new features, among which is an atkCalculatorAttribute for arbitrary calculations on fields and an atkMlWrapper which can turn any attribute into an internationalised field (sponsored by our friends at Zicht). ATK 5.6 should be out within 2 weeks.

Finally I've been spending a lot of time on epointment.com. We're finally getting somewhere with the features we need. I will be writing a 'syncing Achievo with epointment.com' howto soon. Although at its current state, we have a lot of competition from the big guys, we're seeing quite an amount of interest from Dutch people (probably because Google Calendar only has an English interface at the moment), so we're coming along nicely. We're also talking to the guys from MarkThisDate for cooperation (open standards rule!).

The largest benefit for ATK will be that we're pushing the development of the Ajax functionality in the framework. In ATK 5.7 (which might become ATK 6) you can expect a lot of (optional, ofcourse) Ajax powered functionality such as autocompletion and Partial Page Rendering.

Together with comunication firm Effectiv we developed a marketing tool for Cirque du Soleil in ATK. For this application, we needed a better way to search through the myriad of data in their database. Peter solved this by adding a new nifty Ajax powered search functionality to ATK, that can be used to traverse all data, following relationships and exposing the entire database through a single interface.

An example of the type of searches that a user can do: 'show all employees that work in a department whose manager lives in a city that has at least 10.000 inhabitants'.

This functionality is available in the current nightly build. (This contains only the atk subdir, if you don't have an ATK app already, download the sample application first.)

Here is a screenshot:

In this screenshot, I am looking for all employees whose manager is 'ivo', and that work in a department which is currently hiring. (this is taken from lesson 3 of the demo application)

In ATK tradition, to enable the functionality you need only one line of code. Just add the following code to any node (constructor or action_admin override):

$this->setExtendedSearchAction('smartsearch');

(Note1: if you do not have AF_SEARCHABLE attribs, make sure you set NF_EXTENDED_SEARCH to force display of the search bar. Note 2: in a future nightly this will be even easier through the use of a new NF_SMART_SEARCH flag)

Now, click the 'extended' link in your application's search bar to get the new search.

Another neat feature is the possibility to save and load sets of search criteria. To enable this, you need to have the atk_smartsearchcriteria table:

 
CREATE TABLE atk_smartsearchcriteria
(
  nodetype VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
  name VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
  criteria TEXT NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (nodetype, name)
);
 

Peter did a great job with this feature. I think this opens the road for advanced reporting functionality in ATK.

We've just released ATK 5.5.0, the next stable version of the Achievo ATK framework. The new release can be downloaded here

Some highlights of the changes since ATK 5.4:

• Several enhancements to the unit-test functionality

• Improved error handling
• Tab-based access control
• Many API enhancements (new methods and new flags)

And many more fixes and improvements. The complete change log can be found on the release notes page.

For almost 6 years, I've been the lead developer of the Achievo Project Management application. It has always been an interesting project. While being a relatively small application, among larger suites such as phpGroupware, we've always tried to keep it simple, targeted at a certain set of functionality, with a specific focus. I think we succeeded in doing so, as because of this, it appeals to a specific set of users and mainly to smaller companies with small projects they need to track.

About 5 months after its first release, we rewrote Achievo from scratch, because a community started to form that demanded new features that were time consuming to add, even if it was just the addition of a new field. Achievo was in fact the first thing I ever wrote in PHP, so the code was not something to be proud of. We learned an important lesson from that first release, and we replaced the large set of php scripts with clean, object oriented code, and the basis of this quickly became a framework. About two years ago the framework had evolved enough to stand on it's own, and the ATK framework was released as a separate product.

Since then, ATK has seen a lot of growth. Last year, the ATK community became larger than the original Achievo community, and as such, took up a lot more of my time. Also, I'm working hard to get my own company, epointment up and running.

The result is that the Achievo Project Management application does not get the amount of attention that it deserves anymore. This is painfully evident in the release frequency, the last stable release was (although development never stopped) a year ago. This is not motivating for the developers that are working on new features, and it's not good for the community.

So I've made the decision to hand over the Achievo Project Management app, so I can concentrate on ATK and epointment. The most likely candidate for taking over is Sandy Pleyte, as he has been one of the main developers since the start, and has always fueled Achievo development. I've discussed the future of Achievo with him, and he has a lot of ideas, both for functionality and for restructuring the development process, so I'm confident that Achievo is in good hands with him.

This does not mean I will leave the project entirely. I will remain on the development team, and will continue to work together with the rest of the team. It's just that I think the project maintainer should be able to have more dedication for the project than I am currently able to offer.

So I think this is what's best for the project, and I wish Sandy the best of luck. You will probably start seeing the results of this very soon, as Sandy is eager to put his plans to action.