Milestones

Bagstone

Are there any milestones or is there a timeline for the Zotero development? I'm asking because I'd like to know how far away 2.1 is from leaving beta status and officially replacing 2.0.

Or is it even stable enough that one can already do the switch? I like the features (especially the Chrome extension and the standalone client), and I could deal with minor bugs - as far as they don't hinder interaction too much and don't harm the data.

ajlyon

It's stable enough to switch, in my non-official opinion. The timeline for 2.1 final is the timeline for Firefox 4 final, which means very soon (since Zotero 2.0.9 doesn't work with Firefox 4). Zotero 2.1 is now a release candidate, which means that it's feature complete, and the upcoming development is just to shake out the remaining glitches before announcing the final version.

I would encourage everyone who is not in the middle of a very important project to switch about now, since there's no known risk of data loss [nor, afaik, has a Zotero beta ever caused data loss], and more users now will help uncover any lurking UI glitches or other bugs that may have slipped by so far.

adamsmith

that said, the standalone is not the same as Zotero 2.1 - you can use 2.1 in Firefox with the Chrome extension without any risks (though still with some limited functionality), but standalone Zotero imho is not ready for prime time yet - that's why it's still labeled as an alpha version.
I'd be pretty confident that the standalone is not a risk to your data, so you shouldn't be afraid to see for yourself, but you may find it's operation still limited and more buggy than you'd like for regular usage.

ajlyon

Adamsmith is right about standalone-- but when you switch to Zotero 2.1, you can use it with Chrome as well. See http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15905/connectors--zotero-in-firefox/

This combination will give you all the flexibility of Standalone with all the maturity of Zotero+Firefox.