Roadmap for Citadel 7.60

We normally don't preannounce, but there are some exciting features that have been completed for the upcoming Citadel 7.60 release, and we thought you might be interested in knowing about two of them.

The first new feature is a big change to how Citadel uses LDAP. You might know that prior to Citadel 7.50, we had the ability to populate an external LDAP address book with the contents of Citadel's global address book. As it turned out, this was not very useful. It is deprecated in 7.50 and will be removed in 7.60. We were fairly certain that nobody was using this feature, and the fact that no one has complained about its deprecation seems to confirm this.

Instead, Citadel 7.60 will have the ability to authenticate against an external LDAP directory, which seems to be what most people wanted in the first place. We've supported authentication via the host system for a long time, and in practice most sites seem to combine this with pam_ldap and nss_ldap to allow Citadel to participate in “single sign on” at organizations which use LDAP. So why not make it easy? Citadel 7.60 will speak directly to your LDAP server, and the configuration consists of entering a few simple configuration items instead of all that tedious mucking about in the /etc directory. We will support both the industry-standard LDAP schema (RFC 2307) and the most commonly deployed nonstandard schema (Microsoft Active Directory).

The other big new feature we've completed is a complete rewrite of the import/export module. The old way was usable but fairly clumsy. In Citadel 7.60, the database dump format is XML based, and the import/export operations run much faster. And beginning now, we are making the dump format upward compatible, so the target system can be running a newer version of Citadel than the source system. No longer will you have to upgrade the source system in order to migrate it.

To make this even more useful, we've written an “over the wire” migration utility. When you want to migrate Citadel to a new host system, even one with a different CPU architecture, you just run the migrate utility on the target host, and point it at the source host. The migrate utility will do all of the work for you automatically, producing a perfect clone of your Citadel installation. OpenSSH and rsync are used to copy the parts of your Citadel data that are not stored in the database, such as user profiles (bios), photos and other images, etc. This utility will do for migrations what Easy Install did for installations.

We know that there are many sites that are in great need of these two features, so you are probably asking “When will 7.60 be released?” Unfortunately we are not yet able to announce an exact date, but this development cycle will be much shorter than the previous one, because the scope is much narrower. So the closest answer is, “Soon.”