[the-datatank] Long Term Support releases

[Pieter Colpaert]

Hi all,

It hasn't been a secret, but nonetheless, now an official announcement. 
We are preparing a Long Term Support (LTS) version of The DataTank which 
will be released the 5th of December 2013. This Long Term Support 
release will provide features which will be communicated the 5th of 
November and will immediately also be released in beta (on the 
development branch) at that date. Right now, all the programmers working 
for We Open Data at OKFN Belgium are working on getting these features 
stable and are porting these features towards the laravel framework*. 
You can follow their process in the "blackwell" branch on github. All 
features that will get into the master branch of The DataTank (merge of 
blackwell → master will happen in the first days of December) will now 
be stable and better support will be provided for there features. 
Experimental features can still be installed if you are feeling adventurous.

We plan to do a new Long Term Support release every year on the 5th of 
December and maybe a soft LTS somewhere in July (to be decided). 
November will be the month where we will invest in building a stronger 
community, providing you the better documentation and making sure our 
team is ready to provide good support to local governments and companies 
who start using our software.

In November we will also reach out to the existing instances (iRail, 
Digipolis, Westtoer, FlatTurtle, Leiedal, ...) and discuss a stable 
update strategy which suits all needs.

Until December, we are still providing support for old and new 
installations of the current stable version of The DataTank.

Kind regards,

Pieter

* We believe that The DataTank will benefit a lot from using the stable 
foundations of a framework which is used by thousands of developers. 
During the code porting, we are also re-assessing the code. We plan to 
have a first port ready in two weeks (alpha version).