Dev Diary: Build 18

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... 😅

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. 😉

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.

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.

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