(A note to German readers: Artikel über Open Source, Programmieren und Software im Allgemeinen werde ich auf Englisch schreiben, da dies in meinem Kopf irgendwie so verdrahtet ist. Darüber kann ich gar nicht auf Deutsch schreiben ;) )

After releasing the 1.1rc1 release candidate two weeks ago, which seemed to have no major issues, and fixing a few remaining stumbling blocks, I am now proud and relieved to say, that TurboGears 1.1 final is finally out the door!

Yes, more than one and half a year after the first stable Tg 1.0 release and almost a year after the last release in the TG 1.0.x series, the TurboGears 1 team (which is mostly Christoph Zwerschke, Florent Aide and  me these days) finally felt that the new major version in the TG 1.1 branch was ready. This release has been very long in the making, the first beta was released in September 2008, which means that different beta versions of the code have been running stable in production environments of our clients for several months now.

For me, making these two releases, was a bit of a comeback from a longer period of almost inactivity in the project. To be realistic, the action around the TG 1 branch has slowed down considerably anyway, as the new Tg2 has also gone stable this summer and more and more people switch over. But I feel that we shouldn’t abandon the TG 1 codebase any time soon, and we always promised our users that we would support TG 1 for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, it would be very hard to keep up the motivation to invest a lot of effort in TG 1 if nobody is interested in it any more, or everybody will switch over to newer, more exiting (stable software? how boring…) things.

Thatswhy I have spent a lot of thought on the future of TurboGears 1 and what part I want to play in it. The latter partly depends on my job situation, since I might take on a new project for work, which will probably keep me very busy the next 6 months. But more importantly, it depends on the interest people still have in TurboGears 1. To find out about what people expect from TurboGears development (or at least we try to), we have created an online survey, which covers TurboGears 1.x, TurboGears 2 and would-be TurboGears 1.5 (or whatever the name would be). We are asking people, which versions of TurboGears they use, with which components, and how much they are interested in future TG 1.5 and TG 2.1 versions and what they expect from them. This is the first survey the TurboGears project has ever done and I’m very eager to evaluate the results! So I’m hoping that many TurboGears users or people just following its development will participate in this survey. It’s easy, it’s anonymous (if you want you can tell us your name) and you can feel free to skip any question you like!

So, take a few minutes and head over to the survey and tell us what you think!