The launch of getmorph.org marks an important milestone for Morph, and we’re really excited about what the future will bring for both Morph and the Morph Community. This post will outline where we’re currently at, and give you an idea of things coming up over the next few months.

First of all, I need to stress that the new Getmorph.org site is far from complete. The perfectionist in me shrills at the idea of launching anything half-baked, but after much consideration we figured it was better to get something up and continue to refine the design and content over time, rather than hold off until it was (in our eyes) perfect.

Planned Updates:

Over the next couple of months, we will be rolling out incremental updates to the following areas:

The Morph Tour

This one was the hardest to leave “as-is” for the initial launch, as the design and content are a bit “bleh” – far from what I originally had in mind.

Keep an eye on this section, as it’ll be the first section to get a facelift. We’ll also be adding some feature videos, lots of screenshots and a full list of Morph’s features.

The Morph Blog

I originally built the blog using Zoo, with the intent of moving to WordPress later (it’s no secret that we love WordPress and believe it’s by far the best blogging platform available), but after some digging I realized it would be harder to migrate the blog’s comments later.

With this in mind, I decided to redo the blog in the last minute, using the awesome WordPress for Joomla extension from our friends over at CorePHP. Due to the limited time I had available to work on this, the blogs implementation is pretty basic and far from what I initially had in mind. Keep an eye on the blog for refinements.

Documentation

The documentation is obviously an important part of the site. While it’s definitely an improvement over its predecessor, there’s a lot more work to be done.

To ensure the content is relevant to current version of Morph, we’ll be updating the guides and tutorials over the next couple of weeks, as well as adding new information as we find the time.

Themelets Directory

The themelets directly is the central place to find themelets for Morph. Our hope is that other template clubs will adopt Morph for their future designs, and as more themelets are released by different vendors we’ll be adding them to the directory. You will later be able to filter all the themelets in different ways, which makes it easier to find the themelet that suits your needs.

Community Showcase

The current implementation is pretty basic and only includes a few examples of Morph in action. Over the next couple of months, we’ll be adding more sites to the showcase and as the number of sites grows,  we will also here add some filters to make it easier for you to browse.

The Next Major Milestone: Incubator Projects

Once we have completed the refinements outlined above, we’ll be starting on the next major milestone – Incubator Projects.

We have borrowed the Incubator concept from the Nooku Community, where it works really well.

The idea behind the Incubator projects is to highlight specific areas of Morph that can be improved and setup sub-teams – each focusing on improving a specific area of Morph.

The Groups will be open to the community and we’re encouraging you to get involved with any of the areas you are able to contribute to.

At this stage we’re still unsure exactly how well this model will work, but the new direction of Morph is all about getting the Community involved, so we figured it was worth trying out. This is all still pretty new for us, so I’m sure there will be a lot of trial and error moving forward.

Some of the Incubator projects will include:

• Morph 3.0, bring Joomla 1.7-2.5+ support
• Configurator Redesign
• Frontend Editing Panel
• Improving Morphs Performance
• Extending Morph’s Mobile support
• Improving Morphs RTL support
• Configuration Profiles
• Beta Testing New Features

Each incubator project will have its own group and discussions and will be open to anyone wanting to get involved.

Each Incubator project have its own branch off the main codebase and the code will only be merged back into the main repository as new features are complete and have been tried and tested, at which point a beta version will be released for testing.

It’s still too early to know what the focus will be after the Incubator projects, but we will definitely reach out to the Community before deciding the next step.

That’s all for now. Keep an eye on the blog and twitter for more updates. In the mean time, be sure to let us know what you think of the new site