psdlider every beta is about our road to stable. Stable can only be released with the following topics resolved:
- Frontend upgrade. We've been on an outdated version of the JS framework Mithril for too long. Upgrading this demands core frontend and bundled extensions frontends to be refactored.
- Extenders. The PHP extenders allow extensions to hook into Flarum more easily and allows us to keep that side of Flarum roughly the same between versions. As such any larger changes inside the backend of Flarum (php) will not have a detrimental impact on the compatibility of extensions.
- UTF8. Supporting UTF-8 usernames and slugs among others is crucial to allow for wider adoption.
Many additional issues from our backlog might be resolved before stable, but these have little priority related to the above.
Beta 14 is/has been about the frontend upgrade.
New features do not have our focus as these would only limit our ability to change the core code inside Flarum. These would increase the workload to adapt these features to our newest changes. Up to stable changes can still be quite volatile and burdening the core team with additional maintenance does not make sense.
Once we release our stable version, extensions should no longer break that easily when we tag successive versions. New features should then come naturally based on demand inside our community. Please understand that the core team, at least in my opinion, will never carry the weight of feature development. It should however create an extensible platform to allow creation of said features with ease.
