We do have a development board where IPB development is going on. I think we had to stop it for a while to wait for some bug fixes in IPB first, and I think those are fixed now, so work continues.
We have not forgotten about IPB. We have been tracking its market share, and its promise is only increasing. The problem for us has been balancing IPB development against other developments our existing community already wants, so it has been slow. Plus, we have not rushed to have it ready, because the original plan was to release it side-by-side with a new second-point release (4.1.x). Reaching that second-point is still a ways off that has taken longer than we first thought.
I am not sure, since we need to have a beta period for IPB, how we will handle it if we don't have a regular beta for a relatively major version. There are ways; maybe have a separate version system for IPB for a while, or change the expected 4.1.x number to a different arbitrary number like 4.2.x to give room for beta numbers.
Maybe have a system like this*:
Regular version | IPB Version |
---|
4.0.20 | 4.1.0 Beta 1 |
4.0.21 | 4.1.0 Beta 2 |
4.0.25 | 4.1.0 RC 1 |
4.0.30 | 4.1.0 |
4.0.31 | 4.1.1 |
4.2.0 Beta 1 | 4.2.0 Beta 1 |
* Numbers are for example only - not a promise.