Forthcoming Release Preview & Doc Moving Help Required

[zoneminder]

Hi all,

This post is just to alert people to the fact that (1) I am not dead and (2) that I am preparing to release the next version in the next couple of weeks.

I won't give a full feature list just yet but the main things to look forward to are as follows

1) Full DVR control of live and events, meaning that you can pause, rewind, fast forward and frame step anything you can view. You can also digitally zoom and pan etc. This is an optional feature and the older style views remain for now. It also marks the beginning of a transition of the web view files to a pure CSS/Ajax interface making for easier maintenance and simpler reskinning.
2) Enhancement of the PTZ control functions. PTZ control is now direct with a PTZ daemon making responses much quicker. Also new protocols can be pluggged in as perl modules.
3) Deep file systems. You can now (optionally) store your events over a YY/mm/dd/HH/MM/SS file structure instead of flat meaning no more 32k filesystem limits and also faster file accesses (as the dir files are much smaller). This feature however should be consider beta until I have more feedback on how it works across the range of systems.
4) Web DB Agnosticism. This is not a feature per se but marks the first steps towards making ZM more database agnostic allowing ports to different databases. The next release(s) will move this process forward allowing build time selection of database engine.
5) Filter revamp. Filters have been largely rewritten in this release to support future enhancements. Only minor new features have been added in this release (e.g. checking system load etc) to allow these changes to bed down but in future it will much easier to do more with filters.

Plus a whole host of other fixes and enhancements a lot of which have been requested by users and some of which I haven't even decided upon yet.

Naturally I am keen to release this version as soon as possible which brings me to the next point. In the past the main thing which has put me off doing more releases is ensuring that the documentation stays as up-to-date as possible and so before every release I have to trawl through it and modify various sections before then converting the documentation to different formats and packaging it. This in itself can sometime take some days.

So as from the next version, in common with many other projects, I propose to host the documentation online only, in the Wiki. This means that it can be updated easily, exists in one form only and can be modified by users when they spot an omission or error. The downside of this is that there are a lot of pages in the docs and all of these will have to be copied over in appropriate formats in the Wiki. For this I think I am going to need some help. Initially at least it may take a little while to decide exactly how things are going to work so if you wish to help please drop me an email (click the link) or as a last resort PM me (I often miss these) and suggest a section or set of pages you would like to start with. This will hopefully ensure that bits are not being worked on by several people at once. Once it gets started and everyone can see the format then I think it can be relaxed and be a little more ad hoc.

Theother thing I would like to do with the docs online is to add some illustrations to the pages so if you see a page that you think could do with a screen shot or something then feel free to add one in.

I'm going to get started anyway and hopefully we can get something up there in time for the next release.

Cheers