Roadmap / planned features

[ragtek]

I spent several days planing and writing code for my feed importer add-on, which became now useless because it's already implemented in beta6.

I know that's hard and xenforo will always implement some features, which were already covered by an add-on, but it would be really nice to have at least a "small list" of planed features for the next version(s) to not spend time with developing things which will became useless

 

[Shelby]

Uhm,

You want to know why there is no roadmap? Because, if you leave people in the dark they might hang around longer, turning on the lights will just let them find the door. Am I right?

Heck, even being noncommital about a possible roadmap will help keep folks around. Instead of a definitive "yes, there will be a roadmap", or "no, there will be no roadmap", they can keep folks coming back checking on their commercial product in the hopes that it's worth following.

If you say, "yes, there will be a roadmap" and then say it will be in 3 months, watch forum traffic die down for 3 months. Which for a new piece of developing software, is not great for any business model.

So the best option is to leave your customers hanging. Who cares what they want, the best business choice is to be intentionally dishonest or evasive.

As a side note, here's a post from October on the subject.

Our roadmap right now is to complete the functionality that already exists in 1.0.0 and get a stable release as soon as possible. Beyond that there are an awful lot of variables to consider, but we would like to keep customers informed of what we are working on.

As you can tell, they would like to keep us informed, but so far, there's still no commitment one way or another. Only that they would "like" to keep us informed and that all attention is being focused on a stable release, and of course adding new features like lightboxes and other stuff that falls outside the realm of a stable release. But you see, there's this internal list of features that need to be added, it's kind of like a list....

Anyway, I'm going to play the advocate real quick, but why does keeping customers in the dark have to be evil?

If potential customers keep visiting repeatedly, isn't that a good thing for us all?

 

[Jamie]

Shelby, I remember you from the vB forums and liked a lot of your posts over there, they made sense, but this one over here just doesn't.

From the beginning Kier and Mike have been forthcoming about what they plan to do, what they want to do and the direction of this system. They have said over and over again that the core product is their focus.

While I am in the party that would love to see a Roadmap, I am not one that believes for a minutes that not giving us one is part of their 'evil plan' to keep the customers around.. They are going a mighty fine job of that by giving the customers what they want in a core product.

To imply that Kier and Mike are using 'smoke and mirrors' to keep customers interested in this product is way off base in my opinion. This isn't vBulletin being ran by IB.

Jamie

 

[tmb]

I think having just a list of things they would like to do with no actual promises and a version tag next to it would be sufficient. Just knowing they want to try to include x but not till 1.1 would help a lot. They aren't ever going to please everyone but giving better info to the mod community can only help in the long run for this product.

 

[bogus]

I just remember a post in any other xf-community, where a guy or a girl started an addon and after the new Beta, he/she could throw the addon into the bin, because it was already impemented
"They" should think about that, cause if u spend less or lots of time on things like that it could make you quit fast disappointed.
Also keep in mind that its also good for non Coders, in order to the Suggestion Thread(s) and so many more.
Well, Roadmaps can do a lot, also to keep the "folk" pleased

 

[Digital Doctor]

I never understood the need for a roadmap.

Obviously you don't develop your own Major Addons.
I think you might be upset, making an important Style Addon, which took you 500 hours to do ... to find out that 1 day after you release it (after lots of testing) Xenforo has made your exact Style Addon !


Keep in mind, vBulletin NEVER EVER made a good addon. EVER.

I think making Addon developers unhappy will spoil the mood around here.
I certainly see some pretty major potential conflict ... as I suspect Xenforo will come out with some great addons.

vborg was what made vbulletin popular.

"xF"org - in whatever shape or form it comes in .... is VERY important.
xenforo want to keep customers happy, but they DONT want to have to program every itsy bitsy thing people want ..... xenforo wants addon developers to do that. To keep good addon developers, xenforo should avoid as much conflict as possible by communicating with developers. HOW and where that communication takes place ... I don't know. I do know it is very important.

 

[Kier]

Keep in mind, vBulletin NEVER EVER made a good addon. EVER.

Mmm. Yeah thanks for that.

 

[Digital Doctor]

No gallery. No Pages. No Chat. No wiki. No articles. No VBadvanced-like Home Page.
No nothing !


CMS - horrible. Legendary in it's terribleness.
Blog - terrible.
Project Tools - by definition not that popular.

 

[Shelley]

Obviously you don't develop your own Major Addons.
I think you might be upset, making an important Style Addon, which took you 500 hours to do ... to find out that 1 day after you release it (after lots of testing) Xenforo has made your exact Style Addon !


Keep in mind, vBulletin NEVER EVER made a good addon. EVER.

I think making Addon developers unhappy will spoil the mood around here.
I certainly see some pretty major potential conflict ... as I suspect Xenforo will come out with some great addons.

vborg was what made vbulletin popular.

"xF"org - in whatever shape or form it comes in .... is VERY important.
xenforo want to keep customers happy, but they DONT want to have to program every itsy bitsy thing people want ..... xenforo wants addon developers to do that. To keep good addon developers, xenforo should avoid as much conflict as possible by communicating with developers. HOW and where that communication takes place ... I don't know. I do know it is very important.

I know how development works, I've been in the game long enough to know working with a product owner (wtcbb) for over 2 years and developing myself for even longer.

If by chance an add-on or anything being developed that you've worked on (as a temporary measure) for yourself and the community and it happens to make it into the core. Isn't this a good thing? What any developer wants to see? course they do. My previous posts within this thread are just my opinion, the fact that a roadmap usually does cause unrest within a community when they don't like what's being added in that roadmap leads to questions "why is this being added and that's not"? And it also leaves people wanting more, how is it going to be implemented? can we see screenshots? etc (you get the picture).

I'm not saying there isn't going to be a roadmap just saying it's not just add-on developers that lose out as you put it, but rather i think they gain by having their addon or something similar added to the core.

Your right, communication is key, and I think thus far the devs have been very open, even in these early beta stages where xenforo is heading.

I'm sure we will get some kind of roadmap, right now, not a good idea since we are still in the beta stage. Maybe after gold is released the devs can sit back, digest what they've coded and implemented and decide themselves where they are heading with regards to features/add-ons etc and then let the community here know.

 

[Urfe]

Blog - terrible.

I keep hearing people repeat this and I'm unsure why. The blog plugin delivered great basic blog functionality into vB (tagging, custom sidebars, custom pages, basic style customization). My users embraced it since the day it was added and I get lots of new posts daily. I've never heard any complaints about it from users. It's the only thing I'm currently worried about when it comes to moving to XenForo in the future. My users love it, it's well used, and I can't exactly take it away. I would be interested if an official plugin is in the future of XenForo and if it will be able to import my thousands of user posts and tags. I know that even if a blog is in the future though its a low priority at the moment (as it likely should be).

 

[Kier]

Some people would also do well to consider that the best way to make friends and influence people is not to rubbish their previous work with sweeping generalizations.

 

[Digital Doctor]

I've complemented xenforo a thousand times over.
I've also complemented vBulletin 3.x many times.
It's not like I am stingy on the compliments.
I stand by my assessments that vB CMS Suite and vB Blog were flops, regardless who made them.

However, more important is the notion that vBulletin never released a popular plugin / addon that stepped on developer's heads. I hope that native Xenforo plugins enjoy great success. Alot of people want the long term security of native Plugins (for good reason). I want developers to feel safe making things for Xenforo, but I realize that will be a tall order.

Edit: looks like I didn't have to wait long until I heard someone say exactly my sentiments Re: CMS / Blog.

at Noon today: Recently I've purchased vBulletin 4.0 (CMS & Blog) after using vB v3 a few years back. I'm extremely disappointed with the software, it's unnecessarily complicated for my moderators and the permissions system is really long overdue a revamp.

 

[estranged]

I think the blog was not bad but I don't like the cms.

 

[Peter]

In my opinion ...
the vb blog and cms was just a tack on to give something they didn't have. It was very disappointing which was the reason why people went with drupal and wordpress. Another software I'm keeping my eye on is vanilla forums which looks promising but their support is probably the worse of the bunch. As for roadmap, I think it's really important. When people mentioned about competitors having an edge, I have to disagree. It's about how you implement the features that really matter. Sometimes knowing what is coming is a reason to stick around and not the other way.

 

[Walter]

I don't know why so many don't like the vb 3.8 blog - maybe it's because their users haven't used it?
Ok, the integration into vb isn't very good, but on one of my sites there are hundreds of blogs and the users like it...

 

[Rigel Kentaurus]

The vBulletin blog was so essential to my site I could never badmouth it. I have a completely different opinion, this was an excellent product that filled some needs that nobody else in the market could do.

First of all, this gave me the change to offer all my members a blog space. At the time I researched Wordpress MU and that was impossible, I would have needed a single wordpress installation per user, and then a single database per user? This might have changed but at that time that seemed impossible and not really worth it. Wordpress - good for 1 or 2 blogs. Not good if you plan to create 100 or 1000.

My community was skeptical at the beginning, but they began to write more.. and more .. and more ... and suddenly everybody was using it. It was an outlet for letting people share personal stuff that they would not share in the forums. Things like "I have new food for my cat" or "I went to the supermarket and a bee sting me", that most likely interest themselves and 4 more, and are useless for a thread even in a chit chat forum, were excellent for a blog. It was a success.

Later things were good also, the drag&drop for the blocks is excellent, the pages provide the user with personal notes and the blog customization made the blog really the users' space. The group blog feature was interesting, finally I could even create a staff blog for official news.


Is it inferior to Wordpress? I would not say so. It certainly doesn't have as many plugins and features but the fact that I could integrate that with my existing userbase, that creating a blog is mostly a one-click with no work (for me), and that users could jump really easy between forums and blog back and forth was incredible.

A lot of people that ask for "more integration" I have seen were only really asking for the "blog this post" feature, but I really never understood that, I always wanted the members to talk about the posts .. well, in the thread itself. I most likely would have disabled that part.


The irony? Now I have some hundred thousand blog posts and I cannot migrate to XenForo because abandoning blogs would result in an uprising in my forums.

 

[ragtek]

Wow.

Could somebody move the whole thread to offtopic?
I got no official answers, and now the people are talking about vB Blog...

 

[Rigel Kentaurus]

Wow.

Could somebody move the whole thread to offtopic?
I got no official answers, and now the people are talking about vB Blog...

Sorry about that, I have unwatched some threads just because of this ... BTW - there is a report function that you might want to use instead of adding the comment in the thread itself derailing it more Especially since us members cannot move the thread and you are more likely to get noticed by a moderator by reporting.

BTW - I think the blog talk is relevant since I would most likely want to know if it is included in the roadmap. I also feel that NO roadmap should be released ever. I changed my opinion from the vBulletin times and now I want to keep the mystery.

You got an official answer. You were met with silence. That ought to tell you something.

 

[Akrion]

If xenForo had a devBlog those things could have easily be posted there without being explained in much details ... yeah I know ... yet another request for an official XF blog with frequent updates

I may be wrong but overall it looks to me that the lunch of XenForo was a little pre-mature in terms of add-ons and 3rd party development. The industry practice (with very few exceptions) is that if you release a framework and you aim at extendability your biggest priority is DOCUMENTATION and a social interaction with your current and prospect developers (especially these days).

Overall I understand that the team is small and the time dedicated to something other then development is hard to justify ... but having a solid framework and no eco system of add-ons is a big road block if you are aiming at becoming a dominant platform.

The only way I explain why there is such a lack documentation & social interaction in regards to the future releases (& functionality) is because the overall XenForo framework is still being stabilized and the rest is just around the corner, which so far has kept me from installing any 3rd party add-ons

 

[Fufu]

xenForo's roadmap

 

[Akrion]

xenForo's roadmap