Dev Diary: Build 18

luceos

It's been quiet, a little update:

In two days we have our kick off meeting for v1.1, a development cycle (Build 18) that will take two months. Build 18 was supposedly scheduled for this cycle, but we took a little break.
I am working on a new admin pane for communities that have a certain level of activity. The pane will allow configuration of the queue more easily, this change will also integrate the database driver as an alternative to the default system that has no queue at all.
A pr of mine was merged that adds more debugging information to php flarum info. Aside from database version, we can now also see which mail and queue driver are configured.
I've reviewed and merged several other PR's, most of these are frontend related. Perhaps @davwheat can give a little update of what he has been up to 😉

rob006 They're not minor releases, they're patch releases. Patch releases does not indicate progress

I don't think we should measure progress, but activity at this point 😉 Aside from that I agree with you.

rob006

meetdilip MyBB, 1.8 series

MyBB does not follow semver, they have their own versioning system without distinction between patch and minor release (same for phpBB). AFAIK Flarum uses semver (although hard to tell for sure, we have only one major release, and pre-stable release scheme was a little bizarre 😛), so you can't really compare them.

luceos I don't think we should measure progress, but activity at this point

I prefer to measure progress, as it is more reliable - you can have a very active and stagnated project at the same. And that would be pretty bad for Flarum, considering its current stage.
That being said, I don't think that you can draw any conclusions after first 2 months since first stable release. It is normal to have some time with slower progress since after such a big release there are many other tasks not related to writing actual code. I would wait at least 6 months before complaining about project progress. 😃

davwheat

luceos Perhaps @davwheat can give a little update of what he has been up to 😉

If you insist 😉

About a week ago, I went through a lot of Flarum core with a screenreader installed to attempt to use a forum with no mouse and without visual feedback. It was hard. It mostly went surprisingly well, though, which is a testament to what we've managed to achieve so far.

If you keep a keen eye on our GitHub (specifically the issues tab) you may have seen a flood of accessibility issues come through when I did this. I'm sure it annoyed the core devs with a bunch of emails (sorry!) but it means that we can track the issues I found separately. We still have the "mega-issue", which will track core's overall progress towards accessibility: flarum/core2655

I put a few of the bigger accessibility issues on the 1.1 milestone, so fingers crossed we can get those fixed in time for the 1.1 release.

In the meantime (before 1.1 kickoff on Monday), I've been performing some general quality of life improvements:

We now have an organisation Prettier config, which makes it easier for us to format code on all of our repositories without separate .prettierrc files in each of them.
I've been converting some of our bundled extensions to Typescript
...and converting some of core's JS into TS, too
Right now, I've been working on fixing typings for Flarum's global variables in extensions -- you'll soon get autocomplete for things like dayjs and m without fiddling about

While a lot of these changes will make absolutely no difference to end users of Flarum, it does improve the development process for extension developers and core developers.

I've also snuck in a few cheeky bugfixes here and there, too.

meetdilip

May I know the difference between patch and minor releases ? From what I have seen with MyBB, 1.8 series had a lot of bug and security fix releases and they had a similar numbering system as we have. Wasn't there are Patch with a severe security issue fix ?

davwheat

meetdilip

Patch releases are intended to fix issues in a product. That could be security issues (like 1.0.2 was), or it could just be fixes bugs that are affecting users of the software (like 1.0.3 and 1.0.4 were).

The main thing is that they don't normally include any new features.

The official semver (semantic versioning) website states:

PATCH version when you make backwards compatible bug fixes.

SychO

Howdy 👋, here's an update from my side:

Recently I've been going through PRs and leaving reviews, some of which:

Make user.editGroups permission depend on viewHiddenGroups (flarum/core2880) by @ornanovitch.
Fix posts not appearing immediately in pusher (flarum/pusher32) by @rafaucau.
Fix a bug with Twemoji frontend rendering (flarum/emoji40) by @davwheat.
Flarum info command additions (flarum/core2991) by @luceos.
Fix missing default values for some settings (flarum/core2971) by @davwheat.
Don't show excerpt in PostPreview component if there are no plain content (flarum/core2964) by @Kylo.

I would like to thank the community for their recent contributions in the repositories 🙏 : @Kylo, @rafaucau, @ornanovitch, @matteocontrini, @Jorc0 and others.

I also started spearheading some theming issues for 1.1, the goal is to incrementally improve the customizability of Flarum's theme, and the following improvements are all backwards compatible and will hopefully make it for 1.1:

Custom Colorising with CSS Custom Properties (flarum/core3001): this one will be the start of us moving towards using vanilla CSS variables. Flarum is packed with custom coloring, such as tags, default avatars, badges ..etc, and using CSS variables allows for more custom styling possibilities.
Theme Extender to Allow overriding LESS files (flarum/core3008): this will allow highly customized themes to just override LESS files instead of trying to override their styles by over-specifying CSS selectos which can easily turn to a maintenance hell.
Allow registering settings as LESS config vars through Settings Extender (flarum/core3011)

That's it for now, I'm hoping to get a some more theming improvement PRs in 1.1 before jumping to 2.0 ones.

Zeokat

Finally updated my forum to version 1.0.4, we will see what brings us next version 😀

Kaikai

good job!

Bone

still looking forward the new oauth login flow
https://discuss.flarum.org/d/21014-oauth2-authentication-flow-signup-login-needs-work
https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/897

jamesbenzo11

Amazing. enjoyed reading it.

Regards.

askvortsov

Hi everyone! I'm excited to announce that we're in feature freeze for the 1.1 release, which should be available soon™.

As part of our QA testing, we've switched https://discuss.flarum.org to the new version. If you experience any issues, please report them here so we can take action before the release.

HD3D

askvortsov I think it's a bug that other users discussions are showing up in a specific user's discussion
For example: https://discuss.flarum.org/u/Justoverclock/discussions

ornanovitch

Bravo!!

Maybe a small issue regarding the @davwheat work here: [A11Y] Adds missing focus rings back to control elements. I realize it doesn't trigger all the user menu elements on here on discuss x firefox:
- open the user dropdown by clicking on your username
- try to navigate with arrows keys or tabulation key
- I can't select day mode nor log out
Maybe another one related to this PR or this one, or something else: into the composer after pressing @ I can't search for other usernames/posts than the few last ones who have been engaged into the discussion (for example here the completion only works for @"askvortsov"#p182911 @"jamesbenzo11"#p182748 @"Bone"#p181603 @"Kaikai"#p181096 and @"Zeokat"#p179683)

Oh, and thank you for this ♥️

askvortsov

ornanovitch Thanks for the feedback! I've patched the mentions bug, as well as a few other UI glitches with mentions. We'll redeploy this to discuss later today.

askvortsov

HD3D Looks like it was introduced accidentially in flarum/core3068. Fixed in flarum/core1c2465b, that should deploy sometime soon.

010101

Nice, I think I see a couple new composer editor buttons.

I saw a comment above about focus rings being added back. I did some clicking around to see what that’s like. It seems like maybe they are blue? I’m on my phone so I don’t know. Could be my phone. Anyway, my comment is about the focus color. Whatever it is, and if it already isn’t styled this way, the focus color should match the forum’s primary color. Or secondary color. When I click on the search box it’s orange. Which makes sense because it’s the Flarum orange. But, when I tap other buttons I see blue.

davwheat

010101

The blue is Chrome/Safari's tap highlighting colour.

Focus outlines are used when tabbing through elements, like this:

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