MyBB Community Forums

Previously we had decided that MyBB 2.0 should be based upon Laravel 5.1 due to it being a LTS (Long Term Support) release. With the release of Laravel 5.2, I think it's worth discussing upgrading to this version and instead tracking the most recent Laravel releases.

The reasons for this are as follows:

• Graham Campbell (a Laravel contributor) notes that at least the next major version (Laravel 5.3) will remain compatible with PHP 5.5 (something we need to maintain compatibility with): https://github.com/laravel/framework/iss...-148653405
  
• 5.2 (and subsequent releases) introduces new features and enhancements rather than just bug fixes to the framework, such as implicit model binding, rate limiting and array validation.
  
• Normal releases receive bug fixes for 6 months,a nd security fixes for 12 months. These time frames are sufficiently long enough for us to adapt to new versions if required.
  

Additionally, libraries from 3rd parties generally track the current framework release, which makes our life easier.

I'd like to have some developer feedback on this - should we stick to current Laravel releases, or stick to the 5.1 LTS release?

I'm not a developer and this post is not meant as vote for 5.1, because I'm unsure currently. I just want to post my thoughts.

Looking at the time between 1.8 announcement and 1.8 release and the big changes in the MyBB development team during this period show that an open source project with completely voluntary developers needs to bridge longer time frames without much development. So having bug fixes for 6 months is enough for smaller upgrades (Laravel 4.1 to 4.2, or 5.1 to 5.2), but an upgrade from 4.x to 5.x is much more complex (when doing it properly and not with workarounds) and I am not sure how to ensure that such upgrades can be done properly.

Well, the question here is if those Laravel updates (5.2 & 5.3) are actual useful for MyBB and contributes features MyBB is actually going to use. If not, then it's not necessarily important to upgrade to track the releases. Important is then only to get the bugfixes and this is granted since 5.1 is a LTS release.

The new features are often useful, and sometimes bring performance enhancements which are always nice. Bug fixes in 5.1 will likely just be getting back ported from the current stable release I would think.