There are different ways to talk about the future.  We'd like to say something about the next round of improvements, and offer a general sketch of product direction, including a look at Presto's long term research and development efforts.

We are very much interested in keeping Presto a relatively simple-to-use CMS.  Specific improvements will occur in the following areas:

Maintenance Usability - helping end-users accomplish their day to day tasks.

• Explore tab: We will enhance the backend menu system to synchronize more automatically to the actions occuring in the rest of Presto.  Right now many Presto activities appear to leave the menu system in the dark. The Explore tab will be improved to immediately show the effect of any drag & drop or delete operations, or renaming or other change in status of listed items.
  
  
• File management: Better options for uploading, viewing, downloading, and search indexing of documents or other files in a website.  This will include a new "folder" content type, which lets you position a web server folder (virtually) in the Presto site explorer, so that you can see and manipulate files that occur within that directory.
  
  
• Drag & drop: Fine tuning the popup dialog and options provided, and enhancing drag & drop so that when one is initiated, only viable targets for the drag are indicated.
  
  
• Checkin/out: Allowing items to be reserved or locked while editing them, so that others don't accidentally overwrite a current user's edits.  This becomes more important in environments with many users contributing to the management of particular sections on a website.
  
  
• Automated logout data saving: The logout icon may be animated so that users can determine how close to an automated logout they are.  This may be combined with an XML form data copy & paste function, to eliminate the possibility of lost work due to automated logout.  Users would be able to see that they had been logged out, and could copy the current form's contents into an XML data structure, then could re-login, and then use a paste function to deliver the data back to the form they were working in.
  

Web Design Improvements - when implementing Presto into a website, making it easier to place functionality in the web designer-prepared html and xml templates.

• Form interface:  
  
  
  • Currently auto-generated forms have a strict format (such that only one input can occur on any row of the form for example).  We will add freedom to place form inputs anywhich way on a form.  We will improve the programming options for setting up form fields and will make the interface simpler.
  • Convert form_structure.language from "all" state to comma delimited list of applicable languages. That way, first language in list can be used as default.  This clears up a few technical issues pertaining to multilingual form submissions and defaults.
  • Enable javascript generated by this form alone to be pooled with other form's javascript. I.e. move javascript includes up to the HTML page level to allow for multiple forms on one page.  Right now some includes are repeated unnecessarily.
    

Other Enhancements

• Technical documentation: Creating all the documentation necessary so that other 3rd party web development firms can implement Presto.
  
  
• Syndication: Enabling Presto installs to receive content from other websites on a scheduled or on-demand basis.
  
  
• Database table setup: Currently when you create or modify a new field on a form that is to save its values to a table, or when you create a new page type, you must also manually change the Presto database to add or change the table & field in question.  We would automate this process so that any time a table-connected field was updated or modified, if the field doesn't actually exist as defined in the table, an appropriately privileged user will be prompted to see of the change should be made.
  
  
• Module import / export: Right now loading a module into Presto (from an existing module in another Presto install or in the master Presto template) is done manually.  We will automate and simplify this.  With proper authorization, module definitions (and content) from one Presto installation can be dragged and dropped to another Presto installation.
  
  
• Keyword System Change: Currently an item is connected as a child to each keyword that describes it.  We would enable a new kind of "peer" relationship to exist between keywords and items they describe.  The peer relationship would not be a parent or child relationship.  It would enable hierarchic administration of keywords and hierarchic administration of items to be completely separate from each other, if desired.

Areas of future research & development will include:

Form Interface: Enabling the Presto Forms system to express and implement business rules more easily.  Using "logic programming" (Prolog, Sparse etc.) we will test ways of seperating the business logic code from the form design, and ways of making that code more like a natural language, to bring form creation and management into the hands of every-day users, instead of the exclusive domain of "serious" programmers.  Most form systems right now are awkward at taking in or displaying business rules as they apply to forms and form processing, and one must program them in at a low level, yeilding systems where the implemented rules are not esily discernable, and, as the saying goes, the left hand often does not know what the right hand is up to.  In this department, our ambitious goal is to eliminate the need for programmers!