Apologizes for the surprise website change. However after months of silence and lots of haggling with Drupal, I just could not take it anymore. So now the official justCheckers site runs on WordPress 3! Yay!
This website is still a work in progress. I still need to upload the old content from the older Drupal site. Also while the default theme is great, it really needs some love before I can say the website is fully ready. Hopefully before the end of next week, I’ll have most of this done.
I am e-mailing back all those interested in contributing to justCheckers. We also have one new developer: welcome pushdown! Finally the justcheckers-developers mailing list is back in action. I suggest all developers and potential contributers subscribe to the developer mailing list. Looks like we have a go for justCheckers!
Oh my, I must apologize to everyone who has offered to help with the justCheckers project. It seems that my Gmail spam filter likes to chuck SourceForge related e-mails into the abyss of the spam folder. And I just noticed a whole thread of people offering to help with justCheckers! I apologize for not checking earlier. I will get back to all of you who replied back to my call for help, very, very shortly. In the future I will keep an eye on my spam folder, to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
I added an initial roadmap for the justCheckers project. It is a bit spartan, but hopefully it will help everyone who wants to contribute on the same page.
It took a while. A much needed upgrade, some changes to bring this site back into the larger multi-site effort I’m involved and some re-integration work back into SourceForge… and justCheckers is back! Finally there are no more blockers to getting back into coding, and hopefully moving this project forward. The plan is to finally get around to implementing the work I’ve meant to implement for so long.
So justCheckers is open for business… and is seeking new developers.
I tried, but I just could not wrap my head around Bazaar and Launchpad. Both are amazing technologies from one of my favourite firms: Canonical. However for this project, there was too much hassle to get started and to migrate to using Bazaar. So instead I’m reverting back to the tried and true: Subversion and SourceForge. I setup a new account for myself on SourceForge, and renewed the project’s account. I’ll setup a TaskFreak! TODO list and web analytics for the project next. And after that I’ll dive back into developing justCheckers. Also plan on recruiting developers to help out once I stabilize the source code.
Yesterday evening I imported the last of the content from the developer’s guide from the old justCheckers site. I didn’t import any of the even older web content, since most of that was redundant and old. On one hand, I would like to show for my progress back in university. On the other hand, I don’t since I made some rather glaring mistakes back then. Back in university, I attempted to run justCheckers as a professional open source project. Of course, being new to both professional programming and project management I made some fairly easy to avoid mistakes.
For the time being, I can say that all the relevant content is in now on the site, and is properly organized. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back to developing justCheckers again. But first I want to make the site look less of a default Drupal install. Don’t get me wrong, I like Drupal default themes. However the justCheckers project has a unique style to it, and that should reflect in the look and feel of the site. I plan on using a theme based of the static theme work I did earlier.
The fine folks at Launchpad have imported the justCheckers source code from SourceForge’s Subversion repository to Launchpad’s Bazaar repository. The Launchpad page for the project is at: https://launchpad.net/justcheckers
I’m still new to using the Bazaar version control system that Launchpad uses. In fact hosting a project on Launchpad is new for me too. Expect some turbulence until I’ve figured out how to best develop using Launchpad.
Welcome to the brand new justCheckers website. The site is fresh after an install. It may take some time before all the content from the older sites is migrated over. Over the next couple weeks, the plan is to bring the project back up to full steam. This will include regular release schedules, an active development team and regular updates to the site and codebase.
I’m putting my involvement with the justCheckers project on hold for a while. Progress ground to a halt when I started to dig into the code. In its current state most of the application’s core functionality needs reworking. Meaning to go forward someone would need to reimplement slides and jumps that allows for multiple jumps and so-called “flying kings”. And the GUI needs refactoring to run in a multithreaded manner and with a main game event loop. I already devised the algorithms for the core game engine. But I need to translate that into real code. I plan on implement those eventually. But the amount of effort to reward doesn’t add up at the moment for me. So justCheckers will not be on my high priority list for the next little while.
Just to be clear, I am not abandoning the project. I still want to work on it. But there are higher priorities on my list. If anyone wants to step up to the plate and massage the code, I’ll gladly help. And when once I get my other higher priority tasks done, I will return to hacking on justCheckers.
