Another month, another update
A certain amount of January's time was taken up with 2.0.7 related stuff from the devs, but a healthy amount of things happened for 2.1 in the last few weeks.
* Bug fixes - I know I keep mentioning this, but it's important
2.1 represents a major release for us, but not enough to warrant a bump to 3.0; there's no significant architectural changes, but there are some serious focus changes, some changes to convention but more importantly: we've really been trying to focus on bug fixes, cleaning house in terms of bug reporting going back, trying to make 2.1 the very best release it can be, dealing with as many legacy bugs as possible. In particular, paid subscriptions has had a number of fixes applied to it.
* The conversion to HTML5 goes slowly, but it is progressing.
* One of the confusing aspects about permissions was manage boards - the problem of people being able to manage boards and change permissions but without that group potentially being able to see all boards. To that end, because of all the strange issues that can manifest, if a group has manage boards permission, that is effectively now a carte-blanche access to groups (since they could have given themselves that permission anyway).
* The debugging functionality has been improved: it now lists memory usage as well as the other stuff, makes some of the logging stuff work when it never used to properly.
* Calendar got some changes - creating new events will send alerts, the 'week x' thing has been removed (due to it causing a great many problems that can't properly be fixed)
* 2.1 features an extended version of what 2.0 had for installings mods. Whereas in 2.0 you could enter a version of SMF for mods to 'emulate', 2.1 now has an auto-complete list of versions which is updated from our servers like the notifications about doing updates in general.
* In 1.1 and 2.0, when uploading an avatar, they would be stored in the attachments folder. As of 2.1, they are stored in their own folder which allows for them to be called directly, which has a major performance increase (so much so that doing it manually was the number 1 performance recommendation for years, now we've just made it automatic)
* Outgoing email has been tweaked so that it should be slightly more reliable by always issuing a message id (as opposed to the relay doing it) and this should also allow for better diagnosis of issues.
* Several 'configurable' options have been removed; if they are on by default and unlikely to ever be disabled, there's really no point them being optional. Specifically: 'simple search', the 'mark as read' button, the 'go up/down' buttons' and 'display items on the link tree as links', though there are also some options that the code was aware of but never used which have also been cleaned up.
* More of the images are now made part of the sprite we use, enables improvements in performance and RTL support.
* If you use paid subscriptions now, when you leave the forum to go to PayPal, it will hopefully use the right language for you. Also, AUD and CAD are now currencies listed as standard.
* When examining the files in a theme, the theme's name is displayed. Not a major change, but a useful one.
* When using the reports function to get a report of all the boards in your forum, the report will also inform you about redirect boards.
* Because of all the issues around non-UTF-8 and conversions, all new installs will be UTF-8 only. Upgrades will not force conversion to UTF-8, so your existing database will work as expected during an upgrade, but new installs will be UTF-8 only to keep everything that much simpler in the long term.
* Send this topic (as in by email) has been removed; people use copy/paste these days or various social services. We have not yet decided whether we are going to add social sharing functions in the default (and it's not like there aren't a number of choices out there already)
* The function to email users from the forum is being phased out. That's what PMs are for
* When uploading an avatar (or downloading an external one, if configured), the maximum size is shown.
* Web Slice support, what there was of it, has been removed.
* Polls added to topics, edited, locked, unlocked, reset or removed are all now logged in the moderation log.
* Users that are hidden do not reveal their last online time (unless the viewing user could see them anyway, e.g. by being an administrator)
* The footer has been rejigged a little; there's no longer a link to the credits page (that's now in the help area), the footer now also has the link to the help page (no longer in the main menu!) and the terms & rules / reg agreement are also linked from the footer.
* When moving items into and out of the recycle board, the 'recycle icon' is no longer changed permanently.
* When merging two topics, the secondary topic(s) will no longer be deleted, but will now be a redirection to the newly merged topic.
As you can see, there's a lot of little changes in addition to the big stuff - that's something that we're looking at: even the little details are important. With that in mind, there is going to be a complete top-to-bottom look at everything in SMF to polish it all up
As ever, you can see how it's going on our Github -
http://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF2.1 - but we're still officially in alpha, and things are likely to change on a daily basis; you should not be running it on a production site unless you are prepared to keep things up to date and understand the consequences of it; we cannot provide our usual level of support for people running alpha code.
