Tuesday, September 15, 2009

dbQwikSite 6.0 Beta Ready for Testing

dbQwikSite V6 is on the way. As part of the release we are conducting a public Beta test where users can download the pre-release version and provide feedback to the development team about new features.

Anyone who wants to participate as a tester can download V6 BETA from the user forum
There is a thread available to record any issues and chat about new featured.

Official release dates for dbQwikSite production release is not available yet. The release date will depend on the outcome of the Beta test. We are targeting about 1 month for Beta testing.

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

dbQwikSite V6 is on its way

Without a doubt the single most asked question I hear is: "When is version 6 coming?" The answer too often eludes me. But today I am happy to say... it's on the way.

After going through some staffing changes, version 6 took some hits in terms of both scope and delivery schedule. I have been avoiding answering that most prevalent question because, I just did not want to misguide our loyal user community. Amid all the forum rumors of the lack of delivery of new versions, I did not want to add to the confusion.

Truth be told we have been working on version 6 all along and it is shaping up for a release. Version 6 offers a range of new features that should make dbQwikSite generated web sites more powerful and flexible than ever before. The list is not yet finalized, as we try to squeeze in those last few features before freezing development to begin testing in earnest. V6 focus is on two areas, making pages more powerful for the end user and on design flexibility to allow designers greater control on the look of generated pages.

In the area of more powerful pages, look forward to: multiple categories, in-line edit/update, group actions against multiple selected records, new user controls, and enhanced search capabilities.

In the area of design you can expect to see: custom add/update form support, enhanced CSS classes, customizable HTML sections on all pages.

The above lists are not comprehensive, but should give you an idea of what to expect. As far as delivery dates, these will depend on testing results. Tomorrow is the date set to set the final scope and thus the development target deadline. After that some testing, and finally general release. It's hard to say exactly when these will occur, but stay tuned to this blog for news and updates.

Beyond V6. Many will note that V6 does not include true dot net code generation. That's because we wanted to do that right, and rather than shoehorning dot net functionality into the more classic paradigm of dbQwikSite generated pages, we decided to come out with an all-new version of dbQwikSite for dot net. That in no way infers that we are dropping PHP support. Quite the contrary, we are planning to migrate PHP into the same framework as the dot net product, leveraging a class oriented code generation in both languages. This will open new doors to PHP users, as well as Microsoft platform users who wish to extend and enhance dbQwikSite generated code.