An End and a Beginning

2010 is coming to a close, and, with it, the end of our year-long project to create a new platform for support.mozilla.com (SUMO) is in sight.

For the past year, developing the new platform has been our focus and has effected our roadmap. When 2011 starts, we’ll begin a new chapter for SUMO. It’s a very exciting time!

For the developers, this is the end of the investment phase and the beginning of the payoff for Kitsune, the code-name for our new platform.

• The entire site will be faster.
• We’ll be done rebuilding existing features, and can work on brand new features.
• We’ll be free of our legacy code base, which will simplify some important sections of Kitsune.
• We’ll be working on smaller, faster cycles.
• We’ll be able to take time to circle back to fix things we’ve been unhappy about, but willing to live with during the migration to Kitsune.
• We’ll be more effective at making the site even faster.
• We’ll apply our new theme to the entire site, making the experience more consistent and seamless.
• We’ll be more agile, able to respond to issues faster.
• We’ll be able to parallelize more.
• We’ll be able to push updates to the site far more frequently—and we’ve averaged releases every two weeks since August!
• We’ll be able to take the time we need for large features and disruptive changes without blocking work on, or release of, smaller features and fixes.
• Nagging issues with sessions will go away.
• It will be easier to keep our entire platform up to date.
• We’ll be free of an entire class of security issues.

We’re just beginning to work on our roadmap for Q1, 2011. A lot of it is still up in the air, but there are some fun things on there. And we’ll be taking time to improve performance even more.

In the meantime, we’re getting very close to feature complete on SUMO 2.3, which will move the Knowledge Base over to the new platform.

After 2.3, there will be only one major release left in 2010, SUMO 2.4. SUMO 2.4 will be much smaller than 2.3—maybe 1/10th the number of bugs, and come out in a matter of weeks instead of months. But 2.4 will also be huge, in that it will move the final piece over to the new platform.