Hello Flarumites,
Another month, another community update. We have some announcements we think will be much appreciated by our amazing community members.
Photo credit deviantart
DEVELOPMENT SPEED
In all honesty: a few events coincided beginning this year which made progress on Flarum move forward in a pace none of you expected from us. The hosting venture and Toby’s education have been taking a lot of time away, time that could have been invested into getting Flarum stable. Franz has been facing equal distractions while preparing for one of the biggest conferences in the PHP world and his voyage back to Germany. Efforts by others - e.g. pull requests - to make up for this inactivity have not received the attention they deserved.
None of us would be here if we didn’t have the same passion and love for this software. That’s why an emergency staff meeting took place last week to discuss this topic. Please allow to me to briefly explain the decisions made.
STABLE VERSION
Since the early betas, we’ve been pointing out that Flarum by itself is meant to be extended. As such, it depends on the loyalty, contribution and passion of our extension developers to add those features we all want to see. Without a stable release, it would be an endless fight for them, as each release might turn things upside down. Examples in recent beta versions include the changed database migrations, extension manager etc.
That's why we're pleased to announce that we’ll be pushing towards a stable version as the highest priority, so that extensions can be built without them being outdated a few weeks later. In the coming period, we will closely scrutinize the list of features on the roadmap and the changes required to the API in order to release a sensible first stable version. As a consequence we might need to delay some promised features (such as private messaging), but one feature that we guarantee will be implemented is the web installer!
Our goal is to increase the user base of our community, giving opportunity to those that have been waiting to install Flarum to production and the love for Flarum to be shared on a wider scale.
Please understand that we don’t provide release dates for Flarum. We’re still an open source project and are relying on the time of our developers and your contributions to define the development pace.
STAFF CHANGES
As a counter-measure to ensure activity on the project, we’re happy to welcome @luceos back into the staff team, this time in the position of Project Manager. His primary responsibility is driving us towards that stable release, additional responsibilities will become more clear the coming weeks.
To get our contributors going, we’ve appointed @Franz as Merge Master. Making sure that pull requests are handled in a timely manner and with additional support for contributors. This should eventually lead to faster merges and increased outside contributions.
CLOSURE
For those of you having exerted atomic levels of patience over these past months about any news in regard of development process, once again our apologies.
There is no black-and-white situation. It's all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.
-- Van Morrison
We’re moving forward with renewed hope and lessons learned. Thank you for your continued commitment to Flarum!
LARACON EU 2016
If you plan on visiting Laracon EU in Amsterdam next week, feel free to find both @Franz and @luceos in the crowd. And absolutely take the time to watch Franz do his talk.
