It's been almost a year since I started the ClubStarterKit project as an open source project up on Codeplex. Since then, we've released Version 2, which added functionality to the original starter kit, and the first Beta of Version 3, which tried to change the data architecture with SubSonic.
The problem is that I've sort of abandoned the project for a while to work on my personal projects. But in that time, I've been really looking at better ways to put together the ClubStarterKit. This post is sort of a Version 3 feature list/roadmap that hopefully we can stick with!
The Data Layer
We tried to do something cool by redoing the data by using SubSonic. In my eyes, this was only a partial success. The reason I chose SubSonic in the first-place was because the original app really was just a presentation of data, there wasn't really much that went on and from a programmer's perspective, there was a lot of logic just encapsulated in the SqlDataControl. Having inline SQL in a SQLDataControl is really unmanageable and can be a pain to update. With SubSonic, it's easy to update a data sequence to contain an additional field.
What I want to do next is have a Data Provider. I realized that not everyone wants to use SubSonic. Some people want to use ADO.NET and I'm sure that some people want to use LINQ now that it is available. What I want to do is give people the option in the provider. The default will still be SubSonic, since I strongly reccomend it, but we will also natively support ADO.NET and LINQ and possibly anything else you guys might want us to support :)
Wiki
I've wanted to build a wiki for quite some time. Our CMS does do some pretty cool stuff, which we will be building upon with the final release, but I also want to build a wiki for those clubs that need such functionality. I'll be evaluating some of the wiki stuff I want to put into the ClubStarterKit's wiki engine, but I definitely want it's functionality.
Photo Album
I really want to revamp the Photo Album functionality. I really want to make it almost Flickr-like with commenting, tagging, etc. But I also want to add the functionality of a sweet photo-album with effects. I would love to add something like the Lightview since it's really amazing to look at :)
What about all the questions I have in the forums?!
I know that I have fallen behind on my forum answering. For that, I TRUELY apologize. I do have a life, you know :) But there really isn't any excuse for not answering people's questions. In the next couple of weeks, I will be cleaning out the issue tracker, taking care of some things, and get those forum questions answered! There are WAY too important for me to just blow them off.
New Website?
I am considering building a website for the project. Codeplex is GREAT, but there are some things I would really love to just make myself into a website. It would most-likely run off a modified version of the ClubStarterKit (which I WILL post for you guys to download) and will show off what a modified version could look like. More on that later.
If there are any question about the roadmap, the project, or feature requests, PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT! If you have an urgent issue or you just want to talk with me one-on-one, email me (zowens@eagleenvision.net). I really want to start getting this rolling again as this starter kit should be on the cutting edge of ASP.NET design!
Thanks to the community and the contributors of the project on your feedback and we hope to start getting your ideas and suggestions into the product!