Yesterday marked the announced feature freeze date for phpBB Ascraeus 3.1. We have postponed this date once before and we are still a bit behind schedule, but we will stick to it this time. We have picked a number of features with unfinished implementations or still in RFC phase which we believe to be very important and which can be realistically finished in time. We are still learning to work with our new development model and I’m sure we will improve until the phpBB Arsia 3.2 release. All features that are implemented or suggested after today are going to have to wait for phpBB Arsia 3.2 to become part of phpBB (small exceptions may be made).
As you can see from the list below this release is going to focus on improving a number of existing features as well as improving MOD installation & MOD writing. The following is the list of features and improvements for 3.1 in no particular order:
Merged:
- Coding Guideline Modifications RFC Ticket
- Autoloading & Class Naming Convention RFC Ticket
- Removal of subsilver2 RFC Ticket
Patch in progress:
- Improved Page Titles RFC Ticket
- Avatar improvements, Gravatar RFC Ticket
- Improved template engine RFC Ticket
- SQLite 3.0+ Support RFC Ticket
- Updated BBcode engine RFC
- Request Class RFC Ticket
- Switch to PHP timezone handling RFC Ticket
- Modular Cron RFC Ticket
- General Hook Architecture RFC Ticket
- Resume support for attachments / HTTP range support RFC Ticket
- Soft Delete RFC Ticket
- Enhanced Team Page RFC Ticket
- Improve User Pruning feature RFC Ticket
- Rename MSNM to WLM RFC Ticket
- Link global announcements to forumsRFC Ticket
- Simple message API RFC Ticket
- Attachments Management RFC Ticket
- MOD Installer RFC Ticket
- Cleaning up the ACP UI RFC Ticket
- No db storage of themes and stylesheets RFC Ticket
RFC only:
- Migrations (UMIL) RFC Ticket Data Providers RFC
- Changing IP banning to use ‘longest prefix matching’ RFC Ticket
- Ability to delete auto login keys RFC Ticket
- Authentication Plugin Refactoring, User Integration & OpenID RFC Ticket
- Session Backend Abstraction (memcache support) RFC Ticket
- Search Backend Refactoring RFC Ticket
- Pre-Compile Template Includes RFC
- Overridable imageset and theme paths for CDNs RFC
I would like to thank the rest of the development team for their work so far, and am looking forward to to finishing the first release of Ascraeus together with them. A special thank you goes to all the other volunteers who have brought great ideas to the proposal process and have provided us with high quality patches. They have really made me appreciate our active community and I’m looking forward to more collaboration during the next steps toward 3.1. You can find a list of all the contributors who have written code that was already merged at github This list will gain in length over the coming months as more of the proposed changes are merged.
Please discuss this blog post on the forum.