Update on 0.6

Hello everyone, it's time for project update!

While works on 0.6 branch are not as fast as I have wanted them to, progress is being made. So far most obvious change noticable to those who dared to venture into code stored on future branch is admin control panel.

Instead of using ACP provided by Django, Misago comes with its own admin backend which is more familiar to what you know from other forum software than PHPMyAdmin. It's also nicer to localize because its not building messages in its UI.

Admin panel was one of oldest parts of Misago codebase, being written back in 2012. 0.6 drops it for sake of new implementations that are easier to learn and use, smaller, and fully documented.

Naturally Django admin panel is still present just in case you will be using Misago as framework to build entire site upon to, and you will be integrating in 3rd party apps that don't support Misago admin.

With new admin panel in place, I am currently focusing on reimplementing Misago users features with Django auth component. There is no ETA on when its done, but once that happens, only forums and threads will be missing from making 0.6 release.

Big changes in 0.6

0.6 release brings in documentation and greatly improved test suite.

Initial setup process has been simplified. Misago installs misago-admin.py utility in active Python enviroment that exposes "startmisago" command that will create deployment for you. This deployment will be preconfigured to allow you to customize your forum looks easily via overriding files and will only require you to specify database, cache and email and localization preferences in settings.py.

With this release Misago drops support for databases other than PostgreSQL, but in return employs advanced features PostgreSQL offers like partial index, fulltext search and sub-queries optimalizer.

Because models were refactored, to update from 0.5 to 0.6, you will need to make fresh installation and use utility provided to move data over.

0.6 will drop some features. Forum analytics in admin panel, likes and users ranking will be dropped. Analytics and likes will be reintroduced in other form in future releases, so may ranking.

So stay tuned and remember to check out project forums from time to time to don't miss future updates!

See you soon!

Likes and ranking were dropped to return in different form in future releases. We are still at 0.x line which allows plenty of freedom for changes like that.

As for milestones, 0.6 is last milestone that I have concrete plans for. Once its out the door, I'm changing development to Django way: features developed on separate branches, those that are ready for merging get merged and land in next feature release. Many parts of codebase are cleaned up in 0.6 to be easier for future contributors to get into when working on github issues.

Plans for 1.0 milestone are simple too. It will happen when I feel that feature base is competitive with other solutions, when Misago saw plenty of action on live sites, when documentation and project site is there.

Ranks will remain, but they will no longer be assigned automatically. In return ability to write custom user list pages will be added (so you can have rankings other way).

As for theme, templates were (and still are) being rewritten for Bootstrap 3. They are on future branch in "uiframework" directory, but my friend uploaded them for everybody to look at.

Admin
www.misago.adminzone.pl/uiframework/admin/layout.html
www.misago.adminzone.pl/uiframework/admin/signin.html

Frontend
www.misago.adminzone.pl/uiframework/navbar.html
www.misago.adminzone.pl/uiframework/footer.html
www.misago.adminzone.pl/uiframework/error.html
www.misago.adminzone.pl/uiframework/header.html
www.misago.adminzone.pl/uiframework/form.html

Keep on mind those are not update to templates and stylesheets that are actually used by 0.6 to render admin/frontend. Differences will be small for now however.

Nope. Its not there because I would like to see how changed search implementation will fare before deciding on UI.

I've completed reimplementation of ACLs framework from Misago 0.5. However, it will take few days at best for me to reimplement its extensions.

In meantime I've started working on moving 0.6 branch to Django 1.7.

its Access Control List, a concept for attaching permissions to objects.

Well then, good news is that future branch is running on Django 1.7, bad news is that I just can't get Django's test runner to work with django data migrations, which means half of test suite is failing ATM.

I've brought the issue up on Django's bugtracker and Andrew, one of Django core devs, stepped up to investigate it, so there is hope!

Its not MySQL suckage as much as PostgreSQL richer featureset. 0.6 will be using partial indexes and GIN indexes for full-text search.

One of design goals for Misago is that it should let you start small and grow up with you, which means 5$ hosting like digitalocean should be allright for those with small/medium forums.

Meantime on future branch:

Misago is not writen as and won't work as Django app as it imposes certain requirements on how your project is setup.

However, you may use Misago as "Django+", high-level framework to build site around forums. For this reason there is django admin available and support for 3rd party apps is present.

In meantime still incomplete registration form:

Edit:
Here's finished form:

They were entry point to 0.6 templates, but they are not synced with whats inside misago/templates anymore, so 0.6 will look more or less similiar to what you've seen in uiframework, but there will be different tweaks and changes.

While 0.6 is still few weeks away (optimistically), there's only one big thing left on the list: threads. Most of framework has been implemented and completed, views that were not dependant on threads are already there, few new cool things like real time notifications were implemented.

Once threads are in place, with few changes they can be used for reports system. After that, only thing left will be search, and once search lands on github, all left there will be tests, tweaks and updater from 0.5

Just a small update:

I'm finally finishing forum views and I'm expecting to get started with threads views sometime next week.