Dev Diary: Beta 11

luceos

With beta 10 in the open, it's time to look at the next release.

We've already started scheduling our next team meeting to kick off the coming cycle.

The amount of beta's we released tests your patience, but also ours. We have discussed our options at length, including a possible jump to stable immediately, but there are some things we absolutely have to take care of first. In terms of stability the software is doing okay, but the performance is still something to improve.

This is our development diary, feel free to follow it to keep up to date about the latest happenings of our team while we build the next release.

Alshain

luceos
I'd appreciate it if you gave priority to the search. When we search 2-3 words together, the site slows down

Johnshi

luceos how to install flarum in china? composer sometimes error install .... tk

ErdincGur

luceos Why topics are not H1,
It was set to H2.
Isn't that wrong?

tankerkiller125

Alshain Search performance is already on their Beta 11 milestone list last I checked

Alshain

tankerkiller125
has been on milestone since beta 7 🙂

matteocontrini

Alshain performance was improved in beta8 but it was made slower by mistake in beta9 again: https://github.com/flarum/core/pull/1741

UntrustableRus

Hopefully, this could release fast as beta 10 was. Cannot wait to see whats's added!

Strkey

I don't know how you're doing. However, you should start to include nice plugins in the main version.

tankerkiller125

Strkey I'm not a big fan of this idea, I'm much happier with Bazaar being an option and using it. If flarum came out with it's own marketplace that would be cool for sure but I don't think that they should include plugins not essential to core out of the box otherwise it will result in complaints from people who want different plugins added, plugin authors who weren't included may feel like the ones who were included are getting special treatment and not to mention it would increase the size and bloat of the flarum install which is exactly the opposite of what flarum is all about.

imbyter

When will the stable version be released?

MikeJones

imbyter Lol

They don't have a date

luceos

imbyter When will the stable version be released?

Our first priority right now is to reach that stable version, but we are not going to pin ourselves to a specific date.

We have a clear idea of our TO DO before we can tag a stable. Implementing those is a priority to make sure we don't make breaking changes immediately after a stable release and break all extensions.
We are a team completely consisting of volunteers, no one gets paid for their efforts working at Flarum. We are in the process of changing this, but need more financial support to do so. As such it's very difficult planning what is contained in the next release and whether we need another release to finish the tasks required before stable.
We value our community and we want to be honest and open, but we have recently adopted a motto of "promise less, deliver more". Doing so disallows us to state any release date, but prevents unnecessary disappointment and resent.

truekasun

luceos This just came to my mind when you're concerned about no one gets paid for what they are doing. Maybe you've heard about Ghost which is the best blogging platform out there right now.

It's open-source and they have named it Sustainable opensource since they have a very cool business model that benefits developers as well as the community.

In my opinion, Flarum is the best forum software out there and no other alternative can replace what we have here. If you guys can set up the business model that the Ghost team does, I'm sure the majority will stick with the hosted version of the Flarum. That's so practical than collecting donations.

Opinions are welcome! 🙂

jvloo

Look forward to a faster Flarum and can't wait for the stable version release. KUDOS to development team, moderators and extension community 😄

luceos

Time for a first update since beta 10.

Prepared some documents for the foundation so that the two other board members @jordanjay29 and @Franz are able to be officially registered.
Revisted a proposal I made to change our donations structure. Aside from an automated sponsoring tier structure, we are also in touch with potential partners for long term financial support. This will allow us to dedicated fixed hours to our project. The open collective page has been updated to match.
Restructured the GitHub teams to better match our current team structure (community, technical, organisational - overlap exists).
Started considerations for our new website, which should better promote blog posts, showcase existing forum installations, give thanks to backers, sponsors and partners and where we can display our roster.
Some boring stuff relating to bookkeeping for the foundation.

brian85

Good news I will advocate for you in order that the motorcycle association that I help will become a donator.

luceos

brian85 that is excellent news, thank you so much for your generosity to support us in building Flarum 🤗

brian85

luceos You deserve it !

BingZi-233

I hope that you develop a user management function that can delete all the user's data (choose whether to include the post). The operation inside the database is not very straightforward, and some newbies will not operate.

luceos

Another update from my end:

Updated the logo and header on our Open Collective, as they released their overhauled design for it. Check it out.
Reached out to additional candidate partners/sponsors.
Started drafting an initial partner contract in collaboration with Arnoud Engelfriet.
Started thinking about some events to spice up our stable release next year.
Finished up and released a blog article about Release Cycle.

As you can see I have moved more onto the organisational side of our team. This helps offload these obligations from the rest so that they can focus on their own playing fields; Flarum itself and our community. The partnering and sponsoring information will soon be published in a more definite version on our website.

We have our kick off meeting for beta 11 scheduled for tomorrow. You'll get more technical updates once we move back into our development cycle.

luceos

It seems the nightly demo has been down for a while, it seems we mistakenly deployed it under the wrong user. Somewhere in the future we will revisit the deployment procedure of the demos. Until then manual fixes (and sometimes user reports) are required for them.

TLDR https://nightly.flarum.site once again works.