Xenforo & UtaForum Future Roadmap

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hentai Here to Give Community Updates.

So for those of you not in the know, UtaForum is powered by Xenoforo, a commercial message board script that we did a Kickstarter for and your Lifetime Membership upgrades has helped fund our renewals. I have kept a detailed log of all our donations and expenses thus far here.

You will note that though we have the funds for it, I have not renewed our Xenforo license this year. This is because we are on the Xenforo 1.X chain and Xenforo has since upgraded to Xenforo 2.X series of updates. This update was a major overhaul of the Xenforo systems and none of our current add-ons or skins would be supported if I were to update to 2.0.

You will also note that we haven't had much skin development over the last couple years. That is entirely on me, I went on hiatus to put my head down and finish college, so I was mostly checked out for a year or two. By the time I graduated Xenforo 2.0 was already in open beta and I saw the writing on the wall. Any development I put into custom skins would be thrown away upon 2.0 deployment. Thus I have been holding off skin development for a while.

Xenforo 2.0 eventually released in November of 2017, but we still have not updated. Beyond skins, addons were broken and every addon has to be rewritten for the new 2.0 system. From its earliest inception, we crowdfunded a lot of addons for UtaForum and they have been important in defining UtaForum "4.0". While a lot of addons are convenience features we could do without, I consider the Showcase, Resource Manager, and Chatbox to be core to the UtaForum experience and would not want to update without.

Roadmap for 2.0
Xenforo 2.0 Released, Fully Supported
Resource Manager for 2.0 Released, Fully Supported.
TaigaChat for 2.0 Not Planned. Alternatives Required.
- To be replaced by Chat 2 by Siropu or Discord Integration
Showcase for 2.0 in Closed Beta. Stable Release Unknown.

The main holdup has been the Showcase addon, it is a massive addon and needed a complete rewrite from its developer. It is just now, a year later, entering "closed beta". One that beta is done it should take at least another 3 months of "open beta" by the devleoper's estimates. There is no word when the "stable" release is going to be, with it is "ready when it is ready" as the only comment the developer is willing to make at the moment. I do not expect Showcase to be ready until at least early 2019.

So with Showcase's development in mind, I do not expect UtaForum to begin its migration to Xenforo 2.0 until at least Q2 of 2019, possibly later. Until then there is a lot still up in the air. I am also not sure what to do about our chat system. Migrate to a different internal chat, integrate with an external chat, or both? Why don't I make that a poll... Our credits system addon has been discontinued and its developer banned for unethical behavior, I still don't know how I am going to handle that transition. Finally, I will need to learn the new theme system and using the lessons I learned in 1.0 to make new skin development easier and more sexpediant.
 

Hentai

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Also, I removed the "Beta" from UtaForum 4.0. Figured I better remove the Beta so we could be "live" for at least a couple months before the Xenforo 2.0 transition and I just might increment it up to 5.0 or 4.X or something.

A brief history of UtaForum revisions over the last... 8 years?!
Forumotion - UtaForum 1.0
ZetaBoards - UtaForum 2.0
phpBB - UtaForum 3.0
SMF - UtaForum 3.5
(phpBB DB crashed, we recovered by importind UtaForum 3.0 DB into SMF)
Xenforo 1 - UtaForum 4.0
Xenforo 2 - Utaforum 5.0? or maybe 4.X?
(I dunno how we should increment this. We will likely keep the same DB, it's not a full reset like previous major revisions.)

Xenforo 2 will bring a host of changes, most of them structural, improved backend, better editor, oEmbed support, emoji support, custom thread fields, custom member stats, and more. While deploying it I am hoping to fix the login cookie issues, try to deploy HTTPS sitewide, and new 2.0 plugin based functionality.