Dev Diary: Build 18

luceos

Hi Matteo,

We have taken one cycle for people to do something else than Flarum. Having worked towards stable, pushing ourselves has caused some fatigue. We are in the process of planning the kick off meeting for v1.1 and are going to discuss the roadmap towards v2.0 soon after.

Yes, we are silent, yes there's little activity. Because it is intentional. And still, we released 4 patch versions with another one already in the pipeline.

I hope you understand. We are not going anywhere, we only lowered our activity for one build cycle.

matteocontrini

luceos of course I understand, I was just curious where everyone went 😂 looking forward to roadmaps... 👀

davwheat

matteocontrini looking forward to roadmaps... 👀

The milestone has everything planned for v1.1 so far: https://github.com/flarum/core/milestone/21

It might change, with things being added and removed all the way up until release, though.

matteocontrini

davwheat yeah I look there sometimes, but I've always seen many (most?) issues moved to the next milestone when approaching the release... Now that stable has been reached, maybe it would be a good time to review Toby's famous roadmap? I don't know if there's something more up-to-date than that.

Just to know, for example, if I can expect a new search system in 2021 or 2023 😅 I hope these messages don't sound rude, I obviously have a lot of respect for all your work, but after having run Flarum in production for 4 years I don't know how to answer common complaints from my users anymore. I get questions like "when will search actually work?" or observation on how terrible the mobile UI is all the time, and I can only tell them that it will change, maybe, at some point...

meetdilip

4 minor releases in 1-2 months. Is that not enough for a stable ? 😉

matteocontrini

meetdilip I wasn't referring to releases or its count, but to the approach of development. I was interested to know if there's a plan to make development a bit more, I don't know, organized. For example, I remember that Franz was paid for the work and could spend a fixed amount of hours per week to bring things forward and coordinate the development. So that if anyone else is busy, gets a new job, or whatever, there's still someone that doesn't rely on free time to move Flarum forward and not take 2 years for small things. I don't think I'm alone in this thought...

meetdilip

matteocontrini Hi everyone, I'm a bit worried that Flarum development is stagnating again. It's been two months since the 1.0 release

I read only this much 🙂

matteocontrini

Ok, thank you, I guess I'll avoid giving feedback next time... I'll keep contributing financially to the extent that I can, since I know that's the best way to help.

luceos

matteocontrini I don't know where this comes from. Are you that disappointed at us taking a break after stable? You've been around almost as long as I am, you've seen the hardships that we've went through to get stable shipped.

I know Flarum isn't perfect yet, trust me it will never be; at least not to the taste of everyone. But we're doing our best to pave the way in becoming the most extensible and empowering community framework that exists. It will take time, because that is what volunteers are dedicating to the project.

I am not entirely sure paying people (again) to get it forward will help; a noticeable drawback in our previous arrangements implied reduced activity outside of those paid hours. I still hope we can contract people full time again in the future. Right now our focus should be in planning v1.1 and v2.0 now that stable is out.

Thanks for all you do, it hasn't gone unnoticed. I, personally, am very grateful for all your contributions here on discuss, but also on GitHub.

meetdilip

You mistook me. Feedback is always welcome.

But the first line sounded very cruel. Flarum team worked tirelessly for around a year to bring out Stable. Don't you think it is very deserving to get some rest?

Also, 4 minor releases does not sound bad, right ? Obviously, they were not sleeping tightly.

I have no intention to discredit you. It simply sounded as mentioned above " cruel ".

matteocontrini

meetdilip that wanted to be just an objective observation of the lower activity, which luceos then confirmed. The message then went on with saying that it's perfectly ok to have some periods with lower activity, but I was also asking if Flarum will keep being developed as a "classic" open source project where core developers contribute when they can. I got the answer and that's okay, I'm sorry if I used the wrong words.

luceos Are you that disappointed at us taking a break after stable?

No, honestly I didn't understand there was a break until you told me today. But that was just the prompt for a wider discussion, that maybe is out of scope here.

luceos I am not entirely sure paying people (again) to get it forward will help

This helps clarifying and it's one of the things I was curious about, although it's not my business. And if I "complain" it's because I want to see things work well... As you say I've been around for a while and I hoped that this feedback could be taken as a friendly discussion on how things are going with Flarum, but I've seen the opposite. It was probably my mistake to put it the way I put it (and the language barrier doesn't help), so I guess I'll think twice before starting a discussion next time 😅

rob006

meetdilip Also, 4 minor releases does not sound bad, right ?

They're not minor releases, they're patch releases. Patch releases does not indicate progress, because they do not bring any new features, only important bugfixes. So this argument does not make much sense, because it actually confirms what @matteocontrini is saying. 😉

Darkle

I can understand certain points of @matteocontrini, especially in his case since he has been using Flarum in production for quite some time and maybe there are things that have frustrated him, but I think Flarum in this last year has had to fix a lot of internal things, something that is not as flashy as a new interface or features, but the development until stable has been frenetic worthy of any top software, for me even too much for such a small team so it's logical fatigue and a break was needed.

I really love open source as it is what has made Flarum what it's today, but I certainly look forward to the time when Flarum will find strong supporters, both to accelerate and ensure sustainable development for the future, also precisely for this reason I wish @luceos all the best with Blomstra, I believe that projects like this and strong supporters will really take Flarum to another level, but of course this will take time.

luceos most extensible and empowering community framework

P.S. I really like that you talk about framework instead of just forum, definitely Flarum is evolving in that direction.

luceos

matteocontrini I think you've been absolutely correct in opening a discussion, it speaks for your dedication towards Flarum. I actually announced the break in the OP:

luceos but first we'll take a bit of time off to relax after our months of effort in releasing stable

I must confess this statement is far too vague, even for me 🙈

matteocontrini This helps clarifying and it's one of the things I was curious about, although it's not my business.

Don't undersell yourself, we are trying as much as we can to be an open, transparent organisation. These questions are always valued, even when they hit a weakness in the project.

Darkle P.S. I really like that you talk about framework instead of just forum, definitely Flarum is evolving in that direction.

Towards stable it has become easier to see what our purpose is and where we fit into the community market. It might be harder to understand for some, but the further Flarum matures the more it will make sense.

010101

luceos @matteocontrini

I’ll undersell myself and start by saying I’m definitely not important here. But I like to give my 2 cents even when people don’t want it. So, here:

My thoughts are that @matteocontrini should never stop or refrain from giving feedback because he gives solid feedback.

Also, my thoughts are from a little community webmaster’s perspective (my perspective), I’m so happy there’s been a break. For an average person, it can get exhausting updating all the time. In fact, I got scared when I read things that made it sound like we’ll go from 1.0 to 1.1, 1.2, and so on possibly quickly. Yikes. Hopefully I can keep up. 😅

On the other hand, keeping things progressing and updated is important for security, browser compatibility, and it’s important to people with more coding and web dev knowledge than me. 😁

So, as with everything… Flarum will have this battle forever. How much is too much as far as updates? How much is not enough?

matteocontrini

010101 But I like to give my 2 cents even when people don’t want it.

That's not true, it's always nice to read your messages and you're always too kind 😁 and your writing style is somehow fascinating, I don't know if I'm the only one noticing this... 😅

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.

tolgaaaltas

I want to ask a question to the core team, does Flarum block Google's FLoC tracking system by default? I may have missed it if it was discussed, I apologize for that.

tankerkiller125

tolgaaaltas not by default no I don't believe we blocked it. But here in discuss we did add it to the nginx headers that are sent on every request.

tolgaaaltas

tankerkiller125 Thank you for clarifying.

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.

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