Digital 10 is the last beta.

This is based on decisions made before @Toby left.

We commit to release a stable version as soon as possible, with the departure of Toby decisions we made before have to be revisited however. Our current team has a different composition and as such we have to be smart about the things we wish to tackle for the targeted stable release. Tomorrow the team will discuss options extensively, after which we will have more details to share about the roadmap to stable.

One of the things I'd like to point out in advance is that I rather see a few additional betas so that we can tackle all extension breaking changes before the first stable release.

Thank you for holding us accountable. Stay tuned!

    Guys, I think, you should release the Stable Version as soon as possible. Because the only thing is bordering me to use this Forum in production is the Beta state. I am pretty sure that there were many peoples like me who are just waiting for the Stable release... And I think as soon the stable version releases, You guys should start offering managed forum hosting along with a theme and plugin store, where users can get both free and paid plugins and themes. It will help to make an ecosystem of developers and users. and effectively build a marketplace, and it'll help the forum to grow more and more. Please don't get me wrong, but I think only donations are not enough in this mostly shellfish world. You have to give people at least something for the donations they made...

    Did you notice how youtube's super chat and twitch's Donations work? The doner gets a bit more attention than normal people.

    Sadly but it is true that peoples primarily don't donate because they want to support the developers. They simply do it because they will get something in return if they do donate.

    Why am I telling this now?
    I have seen many awesome open source projects die because of a lack of incoming funds. And I really don't really want that Flarum becoming the next one. I have also seen this forum software didn't make much of a progress in the past few years. and at this point, it is clear that the core developers are losing interest from this project. Which is very sad, to be honest.

      bubundas17 you should release the Stable Version as soon as Possible

      The team will surely have a better answer than mine, but betas exist so that you can do all the architectural and breaking changes before marking the product as stable. You wouldn't want to have all the extensions being broken again in 6 months... The software will be marked as stable when it's fairly certain that it's actually technically speaking stable. It's more complex than dropping the "beta" label 🙂

        The team just finished a two hour long meeting to discuss our most important topics.

        • We looked at our roadmap to a stable 0.1 release and agreed we can limit the necessary changes to these:
          • Finish the extenders API.
          • Upgrade to Mithril 2, add Typescript and minimize the complete footprint of these assets.
          • Improve performance, primarily relating to database queries and the search issue.
          • Improve our documentation and extend our website.
        • We went over all issues and PR's attached to the 0.1.0-beta.10 milestone, discussed their validity and assigned them to a core developer where possible.
        • We talked about our progress of transferring Flarum as a project from Toby to the team.

        More announcements will soon follow. In the meantime please assist us where possible, here's a great first issue to get started: Re-add debug buttons for AJAX requests.

        Could you create a milestone with the actual issues or tasks that need to get closed so that we have 1.0? All of these make sense, but unless they are made concrete and properly scoped, 1.0 will keep slipping away. Especially things like "performance optimizations" or "improve docs" are too vague to be picked. Any new feature and non-critical issue outside of this milestone should be moved to 1.1 so the team, external contributors and the community know exactly how many things need to be completed to get a stable release.

          will be implemented a theme system will be equal to phpbb, buddypress?
          Not that the current theme is a problem ..

          ddinchev Thanks for your post. We're always working to improve our processes and transparency. That's the entire point of this dev blog series, too, and we're grateful for how well it's been received.

          As for defining specific issues and milestones, you can see our current Beta 10 milestone here. Some of these issues relate directly to the cited roadmap questions, such as finishing the extender API (#1624, #1781, #1467, #1641), upgrading the frontend framework (#1589) and improving performance (#1764, #1578). These include our concrete goals at the moment towards the broader goals you see defined for 0.1 stable.

          Once Beta 10 is nearing completion or released, we will be defining more concrete issues and a milestone as you've seen above. Anyone looking to contribute should take a look at the milestone issues, and comment there or chat in #internals on Discord if you have questions. We happily welcome external contributors and we'll do what we can to help someone understand the approach needed to resolve these issues.

          Understand that with our recent changes in staff, we're in something of a transition. We're taking advantage of this to try a different development approach and more transparency, and I hope you can exercise some patience while we get there.

            It's day 4 after the beta 10 kick off staff meeting. So far I have made progress on the following tasks assigned to me:

            • Move current static website to a Laravel app so we can extend it with some features we want in the future. Eg showing a complete team roster.
            • Set up demo installations, one for the current released version and one for the current unstable dev-master. These will auto reset, so we can easily confirm stuff and allow people to give both a spin in a safe environment. I structured our Digital Ocean account for these new demo installations. More info soon.
            • Move column user preferences to separate table. This was an older PR that required some considerate changes to work on beta 9, updated and asked for feedback from the team. https://github.com/flarum/core/pull/1467
            • Completed another review on the Intellectual Property transfer agreement.

            @luceos Maybe implement Sentry for those demos? That way when things break you know exactly why and you can share it with the rest of the team for fixing either before the release or as a bug fix.

              luceos With that said what is that easy way? Is it just a .env file change? Or does it require more extensive changes? I'm very interested in adding sentry to my own forum installs (I have my own Sentry install for all my deployed software)

                  Thanks to @datitisev who jumped into this; we've been able to push out the demo installations sooner than anticipated. A separate announcement will follow, but here are the main points:

                  Latest beta demo (currently 0.1.0-beta.9) https://beta.flarum.site
                  Latest unstable code (dev-master) https://nightly.flarum.site

                  • You can play with Flarum! Only core extensions right now.
                  • Mail has been completely disabled.
                  • Some settings and user admin have been blocked from being changed.
                  • Signing up will confirm your mail address automatically.
                  • Demos are reset regularly, right now each night.
                  • Signing up with an email address starting with admin or mod will grant you the permission group automatically.
                  • Do not use a real email address to sign up.

                  We would love to hear your thoughts.

                    The dev-master is super fast. Do you have caching setup on it or is that just because there aren't very many posts?

                      ChadJessen Most likely the second one, it's a bare dev-master install apart from some changes added to avoid people changing things they shouldn't and add the features luceos mentioned above.

                            Alright folks, a post was made that diverted the discussion, and a mod has dealt with it. Let's return to the dev diary.