Greetings!

How did the 2014 welcomed you? I hope everybody had great time!

It's time to take a short stop and look back at what happened in Misago in year 2013, and what awaits project in year 2014.

Looking back at 2013

Misago became "good enough" to run live forum year ago and so on 7th day of january 2013 project forums went live for everybody interested with announcement being posted on few forums focused on running internet communities.

Since then commit activity varied from month to month, but Misago featurebase was slowly expanded towards the state it is now. While implementation of plenty features is pretty basic (eg. attachments) and other features didn't work way we hoped (post votes), user feedback that you have offered allowed us to think them trough and find out what those features are expected to do and how they can be improved to do that better.

Misago has received plenty of interest, especially from Python and Django developers, who discussed project on sites like Reddit or Twitter as well as many IRC channels, internet forums and mailing groups. Knowing that there are python hackers out there interested in using Misago once it matures isnt only source of additional motivation for me, but also promise for future community and contributors, and this is great!

Plans for 2014

Currently all energy goes into 0.5 release which will bring moderator tools to feature base, making Misago IMHO feature-complete forum solution. Everything I'm expecting forum software to have will be implemented in Misago.

Next three releases, namely 0.6, 0.7 and 0.8 will be maintenance releases, each focusing on different part of project. 0.6 will polish implemented features, clean-up, document and cover with unit tests codebase, 0.7 will be update and clean up of Misago UI and 0.8 will be "lets do what's still needs to be done before Misago becomes ready for production usage" release.

The goal for 2014 is simple: make first release intented for usage in production.

Hey there, I know ya from other forums, thanks for wishes and you too :)

Installation simplicity and steps greatly depend on your hosting provider and your knowledge of basis of ssh. At my old ISP I had to write fcgi script to run Misago, on current one I create empty django setup in admin panel and switch it's files with Misago one's via my FTP client, then run three short ssh commands on manage.py and Misago is running.

Next Misago release (0.6) makes initial setup process easier thanks to custom setup script called "misago-start.py" that does more stuff for you and new way config files are organised, with initial setup.py containing only "musthave" settings: debug mode switch, sys admins list, database, cache, email and language settings. Everything else is either set automatically to sane default for you or you can easily change yourself in admin panel after you get the software running.

There's also work on documentation happening here, but I'm hoping that once project gets closer to production and starts getting traction, tutorials on setup on using different ISP's will be provided by community members.