Hello everybody!
I meant to post this weeks ago, but some significant life events got in the way (👶) and as it turns out I've completely forgotten how much of a time sink those little ones can be 😆
That said, on with the news!
On 21 May 2023, the NodeBB team met up to conduct their semi-regular roadmap meeting. This meeting was the second part of a two-part series, the first being a retrospective on the past year's work. If you have been around this past year (two years), you'll have noticed some big changes as we launched v2.0 and more recently, v3.0.
The purpose of the roadmap meeting was to formalize and clarify the direction of NodeBB. There were many years where NodeBB's journey was directionally-challenged; we wilfully and often let our own whims dictate what to pursue.
Another high-level goal of the roadmap meeting is to plan out the next few successive releases of NodeBB, and what larger projects we could possibly expect to see achieved when tied to a rough release schedule.
A couple highlights that you could expect to see in the coming months:
A Revamped ACPWe've tasked @vladstudio with a re-design of the admin control panel. We're hoping to have the ACP maintain visual compatibility with Harmony, our new default theme, as well as fix a couple minor, long-standing, issues that we've just learned to live with over the years.
If you're running the latest code in the develop branch, you'll already be able to see it 👀
cada8387-e470-4348-8d4c-5735eb19f206-image.png
More tech debt repaymentThere were a number of items that caught our attention years ago, that needed addressing. Two particular ones:
component is the attribute used to discriminate against different elements in NodeBB. Technically this does not validate as the proper attribute should be data-component.
❌ We decided not to pursue this one, as there was no perceived benefit, but only pain (as it would break a lot of plugins and themes). It is not conceivable that html as a markup language will change so much that invalid attributes would block rendering. Simply put, decades of the internet would have to be rendered inaccessible before component became an issue.