McMyAdmin 2 Development Update
March 31, 2012 at 3:40 PM
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PhonicUK
When I released the first McMyAdmin 2 beta, the plan was that I'd have additional betas with fewer restrictions as things stabilized. However due to time constraints (and the beta demonstrating that it didn't collapse in any unexpected ways) - what I decided is that I'd release no more public betas and instead just jump straight to the 'retail' release. This also reduced the strain on GSPs from their users to be trying to use beta versions of MCMA (The first beta had a 8 player limit to discourage use on production servers)
Unfortunately this has meant on skipping a couple of features for the time being (namely Multiworld and the File Manager) to get a sensible release time. But those features will be added fairly quickly after the main release.
So as McMyAdmin 2 becomes closer to completion, I thought I'd give everyone a rundown of the remaining things that need doing before the retail release:
- Adding new users to McMyAdmin (currently requires modifying a file to add users)
- Hiding features from users that they don't have permission to use (at the moment they can see them, but will get access denied errors when they try to use them)
- Testing MCMA_Compat r20A formally (New unit tests need writing etc)
- First-start wizard (Like MCMA1 has)
- glibc 2.5 builds
- Pentesting (Checking how secure MCMA2 is)
- Stress testing (MCMA1 flakes after around 400 simultaneous online users, MCMA2 should cope with > 1000)
- More API documentation
- Final deployment testing
- RTM builds (for service providers)
The McMyAdmin Enterprise partners will have access to the main release slightly before it is publicly available so they can start working on their migration path before users start demanding V2 en-mass.
Release date wise, I'd love to give a fixed date and call it that. But I couldn't honestly say that I'd be able to stick to it. I could do the glibc 2.5 builds and find that something breaks completely and have to spend more time figuring out what. While the list isn't very long, there are still a lot of unknowns.
I think it would be accurate to say though that I can release before the end of April. Hopefully within the first week or two of it (and we're at the end of March now). Those who know me well will regard this as pretty unprecedented because I almost never give any indication of even vague release times unless I think there's a reasonable chance of actually hitting it.
While doing a final retail release means a longer delay than if I'd just released betas as smaller increments with just minimal changes to the retail release, I think the end result will be worthwhile for everyone.
And just to make it clear for everyone - Professional Licences purchased for McMyAdmin 1 will be usable on McMyAdmin 2 at no extra cost. No upgrade fee, nothing. You buy the software, not a specific version of it.