Our new roadmap
At the start of 2017, we established a development roadmap for Pressbooks to guide our work through the coming year. This past week we had the opportunity to review and reflect on that roadmap during our retreat at Pressbooks HQ.
2017: Year of Core
I want to highlight a few of our accomplishments from the past nine months (you'll see them crossed out on the old roadmap). In retrospect, our clear focus over the past nine months was improving Pressbooks’ core technology. When Dac came back, having a second developer let us expand upon my efforts in recent years to standardize our development processes under the hood. We now use consistent coding standards across all of our open source projects, and we have adopted a standardized build process for admin and front end assets. We have expanded our code coverage on the core Pressbooks plugin, and continue to do so with every release. These improvements let us work more efficiently and give open source contributors a clear framework within which to contribute to the Pressbooks ecosystem.
Our most significant core enhancement is our new REST API, built on the WordPress Core REST API infrastructure. This is the engine that powers our new cloning tool, and we will be making use of it in other areas over the next year. We’re also extremely excited to see what the Pressbooks Open Source community does with an API for books. If you are building something with it, let us know.
2018: Year of the Author
The roadmap for our next year has a new focus: improving Pressbooks for authors. There are a number of editing features that we included on our last roadmap that didn’t make the cut, and our goal for the next year is to fill as many of these gaps in the Pressbooks authoring toolset as we can. This includes:
- Broadening our support for math, interactive content, video and audio across all formats (with graceful fallbacks in static formats like PDF)
- Adding support for multiple contributors: authors, editors, translators and more
- Adding indexing and glossary support
And more! Take a look at our new roadmap to see our comprehensive plans for improving Pressbooks’ authorship and editing tools, as well as all other aspects of the project.
I’m very excited about our accomplishments since January 2017, and I’m looking forward to building on them over the next year. Thanks to Apurva, Dac, Hugh, Liz, and Zoe for making Pressbooks such a productive team!