Hello my fellow Flarumites!
It's a fortuitous February for the Flarum flock, and..no, I just really like alliteration. January was a slow month for Flarum, but no less important. Even as our core developers took some time to focus on their personal lives and day jobs, our community stepped up in amazing ways. Let's talk about in more in this community update.
DEVELOPMENT UPDATE
While @Toby was on holiday to South America, one of his brief reprieves from medical school, @Franz took the lead to clear out many of the Pull Requests and issues that were waiting for input. His update explains a bit more. Many long-standing issues have been resolved, like meta descriptions, exposing the language and direction in the HTML, updates to some libraries and a fix for the Zend Statigility issue. As a result, the next version of Flarum will require PHP 5.6, as a heads up.
Our newest dev, @sijad, has also been hard at work upgrading Laravel to 5.3, which brings with it new features and abilities that our core and extension developers are sure to take advantage of. And with the release of Mithril 1.0, you can expect Flarum to upgrade to that as well soon. Our lead dev Toby has also been working on an updated roadmap, which should be ready by the next community update, which will include the current changes since Beta 6 and what's planned for stable. Stay tuned!
STAFF UPDATES
As I said in the last update, we are currently looking for interested persons to take on documentation. If you are someone who has the time, ability to write in proficient English (we'll consider translations at a later date) and enjoy writing how-to guides, this may be a role for you. Contact me at @jordanjay29 on Gitter if you're interested.
COMMUNITY SHOUT-OUT
Our awesome devs are at it again. Shout outs to four highly-requested extensions that have come into being this month.
First one is Emoji Picker by @clarkwinkelmann, letting you choose emoji from a screen rather than trying to remember its name.
Next is the Money Extension by @Antoine, this lets you assign points/dollars/whatever to users whenever they make a post or open a new discussion.
The last two are by Flagrow (via @luceos), and are Byobu, a private discussions extensions to let individuals chat without prying eyes, and Ads for those who prefer to monetize their Flarum sites.
WRAP-UP
Whew, that's a load for this month. Time to sign off, but you can check back next month for another update. As always, you can keep the discussion going here, on Gitter or @Flarum on Twitter.
P.S. Don't forget to send your favorite forum a Valentine to show it you care.
