2020 OSS Roadmap plans
charrondev
Vanilla Staff
I did one of these ~6 months ago and I'd like to followup on it and give out some additional roadmap context.
How'd we stick to our previous roadmap
Accomplished Goals
- Shipped new Embed System. (Documentation)
- Alt-text for images in Rich Editor.
- Emptied the Security Backlog (Over 300 security fixes since launching our HackerOne program!)
- Testing Pull Requests on CircleCI. (CircleCI)
- Improved automated testing - Code Coverage reporting & Visual regression testing.
- Refactored the text formatting pipeline (
Gdn_Formatis mostly deprecated. seeFormatService, andDateTimeFormatterfor new methods. ) - Splitting the frontend into different independant packages. (See
/packagesdirectory).
Still In Progress
- New Controllers & Routing. The new structure has matured significantly as we've worked on new projects, and documentation is forthcoming.
- Rich Editor mobile improvements.
Abandoned
- Builtin Docker Images - I was working on this personally and got burnt-out of it before I could get it polished enough for code review. Unfortunately I don't have much motivation for it. It looks like the community is starting to take it up though. I'm available for questions of anyone working on projects like this.
New Roadmap Objectives
Warning: These notes are not a guarantee of any particular version number or release date. It just represents some of our development goals.
Complete the 4.0 release
The 4.0 release is currently in progress. Main improvements will include:
- New Base Theme & New theming system.
- Hero Image plugin no longer a plugin. Instead it is built-in to core.
- 100s of bug-fixes
- Performance improvements.
- New PHP version requirements.
Documentation Overhaul
As we move our developer documentation over to it's new home in our Success Knowledge Base, we are updating outdated articles, adding new ones, and moving some new technical documentation from our internal documentation to become public.
Items that are set to receive new documentation:
I'll link the documentation here as it becomes available.
- New Controllers & Routing.
- Using Twig for Views.
- Using React for Views.
- Using the new Theming system.
- Using the new FormatService.
- Advanced custom embeds for Rich Editor.
- Improved local installation instructions.
- i18n & Localization.
- New Model Class & Pipelines.
- Dependency Injection.
- New Javascript & Style loading for addons.
As we write these we will primarily looking to provide "quickstart" guides with code examples. For for more technical understanding it's best to look at the key source code files, which will be linked at the bottom of documentation, where possible.
Comments
A followup note on the documentation project:
Is there there some part of Vanilla that's lacking in documentation (that isn't mentioned in my list above)? I'm looking to see what else I need to write.
new to Vanillaforums - but impressed by this view on a very sustainable development.
i really like what i see.
BTW: since i am currently in the early planning stage of a new project - i have a closer look at the options and the different forums.
among the question and answer-engines which are open source i have found two systems
vanillaforums - and questions2answer.
i for one have seen that the vanillaforums do have much much more contributors than the alternative. (questions2answer)
see the comparison
https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla
29,184 commits
254 branches
0 packages
107 releases
117 contributors
https://github.com/q2a/question2answer
1,291 commits
6 branches
0 packages
15 releases
20 contributors
well - for me it is obvious that vanilla is much much more sustainable developed - with a much bigger group of contributors.
@the mods: sorry for posting these kind of data here in the forum. But as i am new to the world of Q&A - Forums i need some help to get
an overview.
many thanks for this project - i really like it.
keep it up - it rocks
Continue here https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/37477/vanilla-as-a-questions-and-answers-q-a-site-wide
1) Any update on progress of 4.0 release?
2) About the "New Base Theme & New theming system.": That's similar to what the vanilla cloud service got now just recently?
@charrondev
@leovgsilva
@charrondev Hi, are there any updates on the 4.0 release. Is it still on track for 2020? What would the ETA be, roughly speaking? Summer / fall / winter? Thank you :)
There will be a 4.0 release. I don't want to make any promises on timelines - because I would be lying. The work is being done and when it makes sense to share something concrete, it will be posted. There is no need to mention Adam or myself on this topic - we want to get this to the community when we can.
You can always grab the version from Github if you are impatient, but be aware it comes with it's own risk of moving off stable.
Just because you mentioned it: I tried running the master branch several times in the past few weeks and wasn't able to run the build process.
@R_J oh goodness. I had an issue before, then I didn't. This was a couple of months ago. Do you recall the error you saw? I'll see if I can help.
And by the way, when I mean help, I mean ask someone who is a much more competent developer than me - if they have a moment & I can't figure it out :D
Not even sure what I tried...
But right now I have tried
composer updatefollowed byyarn build. That worked!Sorry to ask this here, but what is the "release name" of 4.x to give your release.sh script in order to build it from source on github? I tried to type "release/4.0", "4.0", etc..
I would like to start testing 4.0 as soon as possible, even if it's basically in an alpha state right now.
or are the build instructions on the site not applicable here and RJ's method is the way to do it?
Doing things RJ's way results in getting an error about types/path. But i can't npm install types/path because there's an issue with the certificate etc.
It's the
masterbranch. The build steps are in the README.I see.
I'm getting this output from running sudo bash release.sh:
==================== Running Command ====================
✔ What version name do you want to use? … master
✔ You entered master. Would you like to proceed? … yes
✔ What branch would you like to build from? This command works for all vanilla versions after 2.8+2019.003 … master
✔ You entered master. Would you like to proceed? … yes
==================== Preparing Fresh Vanilla Clone ====================
Cloning new copy of vanilla into /var/www/html/vanilla/build/temp
Cloning into 'vanilla'...
==================== Installing dependencies & Building ====================
You are running composer with xdebug enabled. This has a major impact on runtime performance. See https://getcomposer.org/xdebug
> Vanilla\Setup\ComposerHelper::preUpdate
Loading composer repositories with package information
Installing dependencies from lock file
[ErrorException]
"continue" targeting switch is equivalent to "break". Did you mean to use "continue 2"?
install [--prefer-source] [--prefer-dist] [--dry-run] [--dev] [--no-dev] [--no-plugins] [--no-custom-installers] [--no-autoloader] [--no-scripts] [--no-progress] [-v|vv|vvv|--verbose] [-o|--optimize-autoloader] [-a|--classmap-authoritative] [--ignore-platform-reqs] [--] [<packages>]...
env: ‘/var/www/html/vanilla/vendor/bin/phing’: No such file or directory
==================== Copying & Cleanup ====================
Build failed. Unable to locate built file at /var/www/html/vanilla/build/temp/vanilla/build/vanilla.zip
.. i installed the phing package but i am getting this error still.
ps.. i run several forums which run on platforms ranging from phpbb to simple machines forum..
We have been looking for a platform that provides a substantial upgrade to these older systems for 5 years.. after evaluating everything out there ( including flarum and discourse), i've decided that vanilla is what i'd like to move all these forums to.
Very much looking forward to 4.0, and completing a test build of the software so i can start getting experience with it, and maybe provide some useful feedback, volunteer to do some testing, etc. I'm a linux sysadmin and php web developer by trade, so i think i could be of some use to the team.
But.. where is the 4.0 branch at? would you call it alpha, beta, release candidate, what?
Wasn't sure if this was the correct place for 4.0 feature request, but here goes:
It would be nice if you could specify tags, in a category, in the form of a drop down menu, whereby the user would be required to pick from in order to submit their post. It would also be cool, if you had some ability to sort and organized the posts within the category based on the predefined tags. You could even have an option where each tag name could be shown as a link, whereby when the user clicks on it, it reveals all the posts associated with the master tag link.
@charrondev wow... what a crazy start to this year it's undoubtedly been. Thanks for doing updates like this, these comms give me so much confidence in vanilla forum! I'm wondering if there will be another progress update before 4.0 launches? I've noticed there's been no 3.x updates for the last 6 months, so I'm presuming 4.0 is likely to be coming soon™? 😃 Thank you.
@charrondev - any updates? Thanks.
Edit: saw your post here, I consider that an update, thanks: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/261460/#Comment_261460
Burnout is no fun -- sending some encouragement your way. 👏
Due to lack of support and communication from the team i have decided to abandon my interest in vanilla forums and will be using a competing commercial forum software.
No need to reply to any of my requests for help anymore.