It is August 21st. We are one month and ten days from the v1.4 release and already 113 commits have been made, that's 53 more than our last release 😱
Here's an overview, from my point of view, of what has been happening.
- @IanM has been going rampant on several fixes and improvements 👏
- @davwheat has been pushing forward on his a11y crusade 😍
- @SychO has been pushing a lot of effort into solving some of the items on our security roadmap 🥳
- The sidebar nav (containing the scroller) will soon stick to the top, voiding the lost space at the top that sometimes happens when scrolling.
- Due to the relentless efforts of @SychO we will soon be making the package manager extension available under a beta release. More about this soon 🙂
- And much, much, much more !!
In addition to all this, we've been making some plans to make the recently build Proposals section carry more weight. As we've allowed not only proposals for core, but also for new or existing extensions, we considered ways to reduce the staleness; the risk that zero action is taken on valid proposals.
For this reason, we are preparing the introduction of Blomstra Payments with its Bounty feature. Once we have finished the terms required for this feature on Discuss, we will enable Bounties under the Proposals tag. There are quite a few considerations to do this properly, but we're hoping this will help incentivize more proposals to be completed sooner and attract more developers to our ecosystem. Obviously whoever funds a proposal will gain the much valued Devotee badge!
Now that we're implementing the Payments extension we're also going to centralize our donations by leveraging the Pay to Access feature it offers. In essence this is a way to gain access to a Group/Badge through a subscription. Our Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors page obviously will remain up as well, but we'll no longer be granting badges to people donating through those channels, in fact we will be removing badges from existing users soon. So, if you cherish your old "Backer" badge (now renamed Supporter), make sure to subscribe here on discuss once we have the feature enabled!
