5 days later

Hello!

We had a kickoff meeting for the 22th Build (v1.5) where we went over pull requests and issues for v1.5. We also went over our public Roadmap to revisit our priorities.

In the past 2 weeks, we have merged over 20 pull requests including bug fixes 🐛, performance improvements 🚀, and even some features ⭐️.

We will try posting more frequent development updates.

    SychO Shortly before the announcement of 1.4.0 I activated all notifications of activity on flarum/framework, these two weeks have been non-stop, congratulations to all participants, 1.5 is already looking huge! 💪

      will you support chinese search in the version 1.5?
      now i use google search to instead

      Looking forward to supporting Chinese search.

      Hey everyone!

      We've released a new version (v1.4.1) of flarum/statistics to fix some performance issues loading the admin dashboard on very large communities.

      You can update with:

      composer update flarum/statistics:"*"
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear
      8 days later

      We are halfway through the development cycle of build 22, working towards v1.5.0 and already close to 100 commits have been contributed to Flarum.

      That's 40 commits more than what we delivered for v1.4.0 😍 !

      12 days later

      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!

      For those of you receiving email notifications from discuss (who doesn't 🤣 ), we are now sending from community@apps.flarum.org. So please check your spam folder and/or add the mail address to the allow list.

      Background: due to the unreliable nature of our mailserver we are moving back to managed services; including sendgrid for outbound email and possibly migadu for mailboxes.

        9 days later

        Yo,

        As we are closing in on the end of this cycle v1.5 and with 55 completed items on the milestone, I thought it would be nice to take a look at a recap of the efforts made the past couple of months.

        💽 The Monorepo

        We switched to a monorepo earlier this year to simplify development but had to deal with many limitations and challenges along the way. In this cycle:

        Some of the things we still have to add/improve:

        • Global Prettier for Less YAML ..etc
        • Set up GitHub action scripts to close new PRs in read-only repositories.
        • Improve backend testing experience, locally and in workflows.

        👷‍♂️ Test Coverage

        Automated tests allow us developers to assert the behavior we expect from the software with different parameters in different environments, thus easily catching and preventing any regressions from future changes.

        Ever since we released a testing package that can be utilized in extensions, we have been concentrating a lot of efforts on improving our testing coverage, even requiring new contributions to include tests for any additions/fixes/changes to the codebase. In this cycle:

        Where we can improve:

        • Add test coverage reporting so that we always have clear numbers on it.
        • Write friendly guides/tutorials for extension developers to help strengthen the ecosystem.
        • Continue enforcing tests on new changes in core.

        🛡️ Security

        Having created an explicit project board of our roadmap, we finally started giving the security roadmap some love. Although some of the items might not make it to v1.5 and will have to wait until v1.6, we managed to work on more than 76% of the roadmap, including but not limited to:

        What can be improved:

        • Research and add more items.
        • Complete the roadmap.

        Screenshot of the new access tokens UI

        🦄 TypeScript

        The migration to a full TypeScript codebase is a big item on the 1.x roadmap. In this cycle, we converted a good chunk of components (flarum/framework3538, flarum/framework3536, flarum/framework3532).

        What can be improved:

        • More JavaScript to TypeScript refactors 😱.

        📦️ Package Manager & Flarum Installation Packages

        This was slightly mentioned a few times here and there, but never officially mentioned. For a while now we have been looking into making the use of SSH access less/not required, and have been working on a package manager that essentially acts as an interface to composer itself. It will probably see a beta release after Flarum v1.5.

        It will allow admins to install, update, and remove extensions. As well as update Flarum minor and major versions.

        Screenshot of the package manager admin UI

        In preparation for that, we have also built an automated process that will create installation tarballs so that one can download a package, extract it to their web filesystem and proceed directly to the installation screen (as long as the web server is properly set up). Though we have yet to further try this out.

        Screenshot of an example of the automated process having built installation packages for flarum v1.4.0 for each PHP version supported

        And that's not even all of it, there were a number of bugs fixed 🐛, some bells 🔔 and whistles added, and ♿️ a11y and 🚀 performance improvements.

        As always, if you're interested in helping build Flarum, check out some leads in our contributing docs. We can always use more people.

        Till next time!

          A big thank you to everyone who contributed to this great news.

          SychO This is what No code person is looking for. Thank You Flarum team for making it happen 😛