Hi everyone,
First off, thanks to everyone who has purchased a Member subscription so far. Your support is very much appreciated.
I want to take the opportunity to update you on the status of the JCE 1.1 release, as well as explain the reasoning behind the subscriptions.
South Africa has some of the most expensive broadband services in the world. An 'entry-level' 192kb/s (broadband???!!!) ADSL line, with 1GB shaped data allocation per month costs around R500 per month, thats about $76. Well, I can't afford this, let alone the 2 or 3GB that I'll probably need.
There is a little bit of a catch22 situation here - I need ADSL to properly and efficiently provide the support I want to be able to provide, especially to subscribers, but I need subscriptions to be able to afford the DSL (around 60 to pay for the DSL for a year). So thats where a major portion of the subscription funding will go.
One day, through your generosity and any extra paid projects I can think up, I hope to be able to do this full time....
As for the subscriptions themselves, and what you are subscribing for:
- Your subscription is not a purchase of JCE or any of its plugins.
- Your subscription gives you access to member only sections of the site, which will in turn grant you access to plugins, documentation, tutorials, forums etc.
- Your subscription is vald for a year, and can be renewed when it has expired. People who purchase or have purchased subscriptions between the date they were launched and the release of JCE 1.1 will have their subscription extended by this time period.
- Although there is not much available for subscribers yet, apart from a few forums, I hope to have a lot of extra stuff for you, to really make it worth your while! :)
- You need to sign up as a registerd user before subscribing as a member.
So, as to JCE 1.1, I am pushing for a release date at the end of June. As I have said before, there will be 2 versions of each of the major plugins, one for everyone, and one for members. The member plugins will of course include more features and will be updated more regularly. There will also be a few plugins that will be available to members only, there will not be a general version at all, such as the Caption plugin and Template Manager.
Just a quick breakdown of some of the new features in JCE 1.1:
- All of the 'Manager' plugins will have a few extra features, including file and folder list sorting and searching.
- Members will have all the features of the current Image Manager, with resizing, thumbnailing and popups, as well as an Image Editor.
- The Advanced Link plugin will have the ability to store 'Favourites' - links that you use often. This feature as well as the Search feature are available in the Member versions only. A Weblinks select list has also been added.
- The Media Manager will support FLV and MP3 files through custom built Flash Players. I hope to extend this in future to allow for database driven playlists.
- There are some other extras I am looking into, but can't commit to until I have figured out how to implement them!
- A SpellChecker! Finally. Moxiecode have created a cool spellchecker for TinyMCE 2.0.6 which will be included.
I will keep you update over the next couple of weeks, and hopeto include some screenshots and maybe a video or two.
Thanks
Ryan.