2017, where'd you go?

Its three weeks into 2018 so its time for an update!

I've been writing about what happened in 2017 quite a bit, so lets just wrap it up quickly: It was a good year for Misago, seeing eventual release of Misago 0.6 that was rewrite of large parts of our codebase, which was then tested and improved during the rest of the year. Looking back, I'm considering the plan for 2017 well done.

We are now entering 2018 and its worth laying out the plans new year, for those interested in Misago to know whats in for them in coming weeks and months.

First thing coming is design update. Misago already comes with custom design that I've put together few months back, but after using it for few months I've started thinking that its annoyingly gray and could use small revamp. This update will land in few weeks together with few bug fixes and another translation update, once I'm finished.

Next on the list will be frontend rewrite. As you are probably aware, Bootstrap 4 final has landed, and so new release of ReactStrap is sure to follow. Due to how our current frontend's code is made, adding new features to it as well as keeping it testable is major pain, and I'm expecting frontend rewrite to do to Misago's javascript what backend rewrite did to our python between 0.5 and 0.6 - make it greatly more maintainable and easy to work with and extend in future. This will likely happen with one big release and few followups that will fix found issues and work out possible quirks.

After release with new frontend happens, it will be time to address the elephant in the room: Misago has no proper homepage to show-off project's features or inform about its state - all that is buried in github, docks and forums posts, nothing one would consider "easy to find".

I'm also considering Misago's featureset in no way complete. In 2018 I would like to include at least those features in the project:

• Activity feed, that will display activity coming from users you are following, thus making comingback to the idea that community is 1% of users that produce interesting content and 99% of those that follow it.
• Notifications to let users know that they were mentioned, quoted or have their thread answered without need to check their e-mail.
• Social sign-in, allowing you to register/sign in using one of social sites (eg. "login with facebook" or "log in with twitter").

After those features are in, I would be thinking what should be added next.

I'm aiming to make social sign in optional and configurable, so you can configure your site to eg. allow twitter and facebook, but somebody else wants to enable Github and Bitbucket and somebody else wants to limit it exclusively to Battle.net Blizzard.net. This also opens way to interesting setups like limiting participation in community only to those with Steam identities.

As promised, changes are incoming to Misago, and first one has been deployed on our forums for testing. We are now running with new theme, which I'm personally finding attractive and nice change since old "grays everywhere!" one. I'm planning to keep it up for few days while I'm adding some polish here and there as well as thinking possible branding update and few more small fixes to recently reported issues before syncing translation files with transifex and releasing Misago 0.15.