The development team has been busy as usual on both the v2 and v3 front with some good stuff to come shortly. We are planning to get 2.7 into beta by the end of the month with a fairly short beta cycle to release. The v3 release has been a developers evaluation up until now with some plans to make it into a general evaluation release candidate soon.
It has not been so long since 2.6 was release in September a few months back so the 2.7 release will be smaller but focused on a handful of features and some new and improved FAX handling abilities and GUI interface. We have been busy taking some great work that Moshe (lazytt) has done for Schmooze on the FAX front and bringing it into 2.7. In addition to the legacy spandsp support for fax reception that is currently supported, the new fax abilities will now add Fax for Asterisk which has proven out to be a great and more reliable alternative for FAX to email configurations. In addition to these new capabilities we are consolidating all the FAX handling into a new FAX module and have significantly changed the GUI interface to bring a more intuitive configuration ability for FAXing.
Our goal is to have the beta out and available by the end of January once we have tied up the FAX module and migration code to provide relatively seamless migration from the current FAX configurations in 2.6 and prior releases. In addition to FAX there are a handful of new features that are being worked or have already been updated in the 2.7/trunk branch.
The v3 development has been quite intensive since its announcement several months ago. The new framework has continued to be improved as more development eyes and input has been involved with the project. There has also been a lot of action on the telephony driver front with active work continuing on both the Asterisk and FreeSWTCH drivers. The team is driving hard to move v3 from the "development evaluation" stage to a "general evaluation" release candidate. This will give a much broader audience the opportunity to start kicking the tires and providing the much valued feedback that we always look for in our community to make sure our products evolve towards the great PBX and telephony applications that you have come to expect from FreePBX.
We will update you shortly on the progress and specific plans and events on both the v2 and v3 front as they further materialize over the next weeks.
philippe - on behalf of the FreePBX Team