Last week, Google's Open Source Team hosted the Gallery project's first team sprint. Ten core team members, some from their offices at Google and some from as far away as Serbia, got together on the Google campus on October 22-24 to figure out the future of the Gallery project.
During the weeks prior to the sprint, the Gallery community embarked on some ambitious discussions about what we could do if we took advantage of new technology. We evaluated various PHP frameworks by implementing a basic UI in each one, reviewed feature lists, and examined as many available options as possible. Combined with usability work driven by Jakob Hilden that originated with the OpenUsability project's Season of Usability this year, these discussions and explorations paved the way for the sprint: major decisions and the beginning of a rewrite!
Once at Google we spent a lot of time discussing options, tinkering with code, and continuing discussions into the evening at bars and restaurants in Mountain View.
By Friday, we settled on code standards, feature lists, a new project management methodology using trackers on SourceForge and a shared task list in Chandler, and the Kohana PHP framework. We didn't quite finish the code yet, but it's all in our SourceForge Subversion repository in a temporary location, and we look forward to introducing Gallery 3 to the world in a few months.
Gallery Sprinters
(photo used with the permission of Chris Kelly)
More pictures and more details will be available on gallery.menalto.com later this week.
