Where are we?
Software development is like planning a cross-country expedition with multiple destinations.
When you set out for version 2.4, you're not just driving to the next town over. You're charting a course through unknown territory with several strategic stops planned along the way - each representing a major milestone or feature release.
But the challenge is the landscape keeps changing along the journey.
- New roads open up (better technologies emerge)
- Bridges get washed out (dependencies break or become obsolete)
- You discover scenic routes that would benefit all future travellers (opportunities for architectural improvements)
- Weather conditions shift (market demands or user needs evolve)
- Your vehicle needs unexpected maintenance (technical debt must be addressed)
This is why scope changes occur: experienced developers are constantly recalibrating the route based on new information, ensuring the expedition can successfully reach not just the next destination, but all the strategic waypoints that follow.
The delays aren't detours, rather they're course corrections that keep the long-term journey viable.
To be slightly less cryptic, these are some of the specific challenges we have faced along the way:
A new Tiptap version is coming
When we announced that Tiptap is coming to XenForo 2.4 it was 95% complete, and we then took a bit of a pause to work on other projects, which we have talked about since and will be discussing in this thread. Since then, Tiptap have announced Tiptap V3 which is currently in beta. Given how core the editor is to the forum experience, it makes a lot of sense to ship XenForo 2.4 with Tiptap V3 rather than Tiptap V2 as originally planned. While the changes involved are not too extensive, we also don't want to ship 2.4 with a dependency that is still in beta and subject to change. While we are not planning to wait for Tiptap V3 to be stable, necessarily, we do at least want to give it a little bit more time so we have a higher degree of confidence that we're shipping a stable editing experience.We started talking about a rewrite (again)
While this is not currently the direction we've decided to go in, it's responsible for us to at least consider all routes available to us to help us reach our destination.After nearly 8 years since the release of XenForo 2.0, many of the technologies we use are showing their age, many of the decisions we made have started to slow us down more than we would like, and as a framework, XenForo becomes a less productive framework to work with. The solution to this problem can be to start from scratch, but we have ultimately decided that this is not something we need to do at this stage.
Instead, over the next few versions, including 2.4, we will be attempting to make iterative architectural changes to the framework so that we all have greater tools at our disposal to improve both the developer and user experience, particularly focusing on the implementation of developer tools and features that have become commonplace in other frameworks, such as Laravel.
Some of our best features are simply not finished
There are one or two features that we see requested consistently from customers in our community forums and feedback channels, and we're excited to confirm they are coming in 2.4! However, it serves no one well if we release such highly-anticipated features before they are ready and before they have the usual level of quality, polish, and extensibility you would expect from a XenForo release. We'd rather take the extra time to get them right than rush them out and disappoint users with a subpar implementation that requires immediate patches or lacks the flexibility for customisation. We'll be sharing exciting details about what these features are and how they work in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!We can't keep up!
I just counted and there are about 15 features that have been merged or are pending to be merged into XF 2.4 that we haven't announced yet. Some of these are smaller and aren't worthy of a dedicated HYS of their own (so they'll probably be rolled into a "miscellaneous" HYS or two), and some of these are going to be mentioned below, but while we have been "cooking" (as the kids say these days) it has meant that things like code reviews, and writing HYS posts hasn't been easy to balance. There is also potentially more stuff coming from generous contributions from esteemed developers such as @Xon and @digitalpoint, assuming we have time to implement (otherwise they will wait for... a future version).With all of that now being said, while 2.4 is taking longer than we wanted, we have been busy and we are very much nearing the end of development.
And, while disappointing (to all of us) it is important to maintain perspective. XenForo 2.2 was released in September 2020. XenForo 2.3 was released nearly four years later. XenForo 2.4 is not 3 more years away.
But, you clicked this to find out what's new, right? So let's go.
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~2 months, 10 days
Summary:
That works both ways, I'm sure those talented devs feel lucky they have such a great product to hang a business on.
