For those of you who don't follow live in the dotProject forums like myself*, you may have missed the announcement that v2.0rc1 is due out by the end of the month. It has been a solid year since the last release, but major development has been happening across nearly every portion of the system.

First of all, the permission system has been completely reworked. This has been problematic in the past as read/write/all access was a piecemeal and completely broke down at times. The concept of permissions has been completely rewritten using phpgACL. It allows a much higher degree of flexibility and much finer control over the user priviledges. It is built from five different facets:

Next, one of the authentication methods is LDAP. If you have an LDAP server on your network, you can simply drop this into place, create your users and give them permissions and your users will be ready to use the system without having to remember yet another password.

Next, an entire series of database revisions have taken place to simplify, improve the reliability, and reduce the work of the system. The Users table is now simply that. It does not have all of the standard Contact information, there is a link connecting the two. Therefore, there is no need to maintain a User's contact information in two places.

Finally, the session system is completely rebuilt. Currently on 1.0.2, if your php session is set for a short period, you must login repeatedly throughout the day. In 2.0, the administrator can set this timeout manually in order to allow for a user to continue working on other things without having to refresh the window occassionally.

There are quite a few other features and fixes lurking around in the v2.0 system, but I haven't had time to dig through it completely. I hope to get the chance to do this immediately after the release and post my findings here.

So, if you're looking to help out and your are an active dotProject user, please head over to the forums and check out this post to see where you can help with the effort. If nothing else, go tell AJ, Karen, Cyberhorse and the others that they're doing a great job.

* As has been stated before: I am one of the contributors to the project and highly active in the forums, username: caseydk. I'm 98% biased with a +/- 2% margin of error.