2015-05-09, 04:20 PM
Hi Lennart,
MyBB has previously (as I'm sure you remember) had an ideas section in which the community could submit and vote upon ideas. I'm also sure you can remember how that ended up - with many duplicate suggestions and suggestions for features that were either already in the core or had been previously decided would be best suited as plugins (such as hundreds of requests for image galleries, download sections, shops, etc.).
We've been trying to follow a middle of the road approach with MyBB 2.0 development, with the team suggesting features internally, then asking members for feedback and ideas. Unfortunately, this process hasn't really been done in one specific location and has been spread across many threads and forums. We do listen to member feedback and ideas and take them into account during development.
Regarding the framework choice, we did listen to community feedback. When we announced (a long time ago) that we'd be using Yii, there was a lot of negative feedback regarding that choice - both here and on other mediums such as Twitter. One of the alternative frameworks suggested most frequently was Laravel, along with Symfony. We listened to this feedback and investigated alternative frameworks. Combined with the extremely long development cycle for Yii 2.0 (not quite as long as ours, and the framework has turned out to be a great product), we started to investigate the alternatives much more thoroughly. Laravel came out on top due to it's large community providing support, the wealth of supporting third (and first) party libraries to extend the framework (allowing much more rapid development on our parts), the modern approach to PHP development, the support for unit testing and mocking straight out of the box, the extensive usage of Composer, and more led to it coming out on top.
Regarding having no idea where we are heading, that is certainly currently an issue. We plan to have a public roadmap for the future of MyBB 2.0 soon (likely as soon as we open source the repositories). We will also be holding public Alphas, Betas and Release Candidates to consult community feedback and suggestions. Of course, the repositories will also be open to Pull Requests with code (and/or) documentation contributions.
PS: on a side note:
Laravel 5 is an incremental upgrade to 4.0. Both me and Will P. work with Laravel 5 (and previously 4) extensively at our places of work, so we are pretty familiar with the framework and how the internals operate.
I hope that answers your concerns and provides some insight upon our plans and the future. I recently took over the position of leading development, and have several plans for the future of the project.
MyBB has previously (as I'm sure you remember) had an ideas section in which the community could submit and vote upon ideas. I'm also sure you can remember how that ended up - with many duplicate suggestions and suggestions for features that were either already in the core or had been previously decided would be best suited as plugins (such as hundreds of requests for image galleries, download sections, shops, etc.).
We've been trying to follow a middle of the road approach with MyBB 2.0 development, with the team suggesting features internally, then asking members for feedback and ideas. Unfortunately, this process hasn't really been done in one specific location and has been spread across many threads and forums. We do listen to member feedback and ideas and take them into account during development.
Regarding the framework choice, we did listen to community feedback. When we announced (a long time ago) that we'd be using Yii, there was a lot of negative feedback regarding that choice - both here and on other mediums such as Twitter. One of the alternative frameworks suggested most frequently was Laravel, along with Symfony. We listened to this feedback and investigated alternative frameworks. Combined with the extremely long development cycle for Yii 2.0 (not quite as long as ours, and the framework has turned out to be a great product), we started to investigate the alternatives much more thoroughly. Laravel came out on top due to it's large community providing support, the wealth of supporting third (and first) party libraries to extend the framework (allowing much more rapid development on our parts), the modern approach to PHP development, the support for unit testing and mocking straight out of the box, the extensive usage of Composer, and more led to it coming out on top.
Regarding having no idea where we are heading, that is certainly currently an issue. We plan to have a public roadmap for the future of MyBB 2.0 soon (likely as soon as we open source the repositories). We will also be holding public Alphas, Betas and Release Candidates to consult community feedback and suggestions. Of course, the repositories will also be open to Pull Requests with code (and/or) documentation contributions.
PS: on a side note:
Quote:And Laravel 5 is pretty new so I don't think anybody knows that framework so well.
Laravel 5 is an incremental upgrade to 4.0. Both me and Will P. work with Laravel 5 (and previously 4) extensively at our places of work, so we are pretty familiar with the framework and how the internals operate.
I hope that answers your concerns and provides some insight upon our plans and the future. I recently took over the position of leading development, and have several plans for the future of the project.