2.0 MyBB2 _ based on Laravel or YII ??

[Lennart Sauter]

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.).

That was the one I refered to in my last post  
Yes the management of the idea section was not done in the best way but the section brought some good ideas to implementation and you could actually see what moved the community.
And requests for image galleries for example could have had let to some sort of REST/API integration with coppermine (solved finally as a plugin/bridge as far as I remember).

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.

It's spread widely and people like me don't actually have the time to follow every subthread here. I usually have a deep look into the github issues at other projects but that's not possible here at MyBB aswell.
Could be improved. But as you wrote:

We do listen to member feedback and ideas and take them into account during development.

That's the definition of community supported, not community driven  
And it's okay.

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.

And these sentences would have been great if posted before the decision has been made. Together with a comparison chart.
Example:
Framework | Size of community | support of third party applications | modern approach | unit testing
Laravel 5 | huge | yes | yes | yes | yes
YII 2 | small | partly | yes | partly
ZF 2 | huge | yes | nope | partly

And the result is that the devs will go for X because the points Y and Z are most important for a bulletin board software.

Maybe you can take that into account for further decisions. For example if you decide that you want to go via composer only installation (which would probably mean the end of MyBB being used in some projects from our company). Or that attachments will be handled by dropbox or owncloud. Why not - if there is an explanation for it.

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.

And I am looking forward to everything of it. I'm looking forward to read what you will be doing and why. And if you are unsure, you can always ask your community here. It'll probably go for image galleries  

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'm working extensively with YII too but I could not tell wether you should base an instant messenger on it or not or what other framework would be best suited. I'd first get the requirements (AJAX, fast write/read possibilities, probably NoSQL support...) and decide based on that facts.
If you know one framework, you can handle them all. Well, maybe except for CI.
I worked with Zend, YII, Symfony, Laravel and CakePHP and they all follow the same standards more or less. And they are all more or less suited for specific projects. They key question in my opinion is what the requirements are and which framework fits them best.

Apparently, Laravel fits best for MyBB 2.0 because you and Will are familiar with it and will do most of the development work, because you want to rapidly build the new application and don't want to use Ruby on Rails but expect Laravel and a bunch of other third party php classes to support that cause.
MVC is standard at modern frameworks, composer seems to be important for MyBBs future - Laravel handles that well (as does YII and Zend btw). Unit testing is indeed a nice touch, looking forward to less bugs in MyBB 2.0 with that.