The next version of Octopress is packed full of awesome improvements. Octopress will change massively to be more extensible and customizable while still being as powerful and easy as ever; as such, this update has been in development for a long time, still not having released officially.
In anticipation of this update, I periodically check the Octopress Twitter for news and have encountered many release date estimates. Estimating time for development is notoriously difficult, so I’ve compiled a lighthearted Twitter history of Octopress 2.0’s successor and its estimated release dates.
The follow-up to Octopress 2.0 was originally envisioned as a much smaller set of changes to be called Octopress 2.1. The release of this version was first mentioned in March of 2012 as “soon”.
By May, the outlook for Octopress 2.1 was looking good enough that its release seemed imminent, within a “day or two”.
But it was not to be! A week and a half later, in June, 2.1 was still looking as though it would release “soon”.
Next month, July, enough progress had been made to offer a new estimate that 2.1 would release in a “week or two”.
It was not until 4 months later in November that the next estimation was made that 2.1 would be released before the end of 2012.
With an acknowledgement of the difficulty in estimating, by January 2013 Octopress 2.1 was predicted to be completed “soon”.
In February, it seemed that the eagerly awaited update would be finalized within a “month or two”.
With the tremendous amount of effort that had gone into the update, it seemed more fitting that the major version change, so it would instead be released as Octopress 3.0.
By March, this 3.0 update’s release date was further clarified to “mid April”.
My mid April, though, it seemed more likely that the release would occur later in the month.
Although an April release had been missed, by late May it seemed that there would be a 3.0 release candidate available within a “month or so”.
At the end of June, the ambitious Octopress 3.0 was still predicted to arrive during the summer.
And so we still anticipate the official release of this update that will redefine Octopress. This does showcase a neat benefit of open source; despite not being officilly released, you can try out 3.0 and closely follow its development on GitHub.
Regardless of Octopress’ history of imprecise estimates, I have great faith in its developers to deliver such an ambitious update. I’ll keep an eye out on Twitter for an announcement that Octopress 3.0 has finally been perfected!
Update (Aug 18, 2013): By the end of July, there was still “a ways to go” on Octopress 3.0, but version 2.1 of Octopress was resurrected as a smaller, incremental upgrade on the way to Octopress 3.0.
Update (Feb 15, 2014): In September, Octopress 3.0 still wasn’t ready for release, but it seemed mature enough that a blog post was promised detailing the roadmap leading up to its release.
Despite it originally being anticipated that this blog post would be published within a week, by mid October there were still details to be ironed out.
By the new year, it appeared that version 3.0 was still “a couple of months” away from being released.
It also appears that the previously proposed version 2.1 was abandoned, so no new version is slated before Octopress 3.0.