MyBB’s ecosystem spans across several platforms connecting contributors, authors, and users. In this post, we’ll collect a number of recent highlights from around the Project.
10³ Stars on GitHub
Software is often divided into closed- and open-style development.
Back in 2009, MyBB switched from the former to the latter, enabling administrators and developers, who tweak their forums in the most random ways, to submit and see their fixes in official releases. The move also opened up the development process and allowed a crowd of enthusiasts to critique any upcoming changes and test them on their own servers, and with custom plugins.
Since then, code from 100+ contributors has made its way into MyBB, and earlier this year, the Project’s main repository passed the symbolic threshold of 1K stars from members of the open source community.
If you have patches of your own, or would like to otherwise make MyBB a better forum software, explore some of the options in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.
10² Stars for Top Extensions
If you’ve been using MyBB, you’ll know that the core package is only a part of its identity: extensions have an important place in the ecosystem that’s been maturing for two decades.
Today, the Extend platform hosts over 1300 projects that have published more than five thousand releases downloaded well over two million times, and a pair of extensions have already crossed the 100-star mark — taking a portion of over 6.5 thousand stars given in total.
Starring projects allows you to find them in a single place when you’re ready to start your new forum, and subscribing to them (which was done more than a thousand times) will notify you of new releases to check out.
As we work to define MyBB as lightweight software with modern features, we aim to further strengthen extensions as a pillar of the application by building authoring aids and APIs into the core to make the experience easier and more pleasant for everyone involved.
10¹ Development News
In recent months, numerous key elements of the upcoming series have taken shape. Read ten notes about the View system, extending MyBB, merged features, requirements, and upcoming works in the 1.9 Development Milestone thread.
We have also published a Quick Start cheatsheet, allowing you to set up the development branch and preview it right away using your favorite workflow.
If you’re ready for some tinkering and a deeper dive, read Experimenting with Inheritance Basics, where we make use of the new theming system and track how the application handles it so far.
10⁰ Familiar-looking Theme
When patrolling the Extend section, we noticed one submission was particularly reminiscent, but we couldn’t put our finger on it. A careful investigation that included, among other methods, reading its documentation revealed that it’s MyBB 1.9’s official theme — for MyBB 1.8.
The Curves UI takes the upcoming series’ look and backports it visually into the current stable version. It is also maintained on GitHub, where you can work with authors to improve it further.
It joins many responsive Community-maintained themes, so it’s another good starting point for customization, and if you’re looking to prepare your forum for the style transition into 1.9.x, you can now use its latest build to make the eventual switch extra smooth.
The Base
With the Community-driven environment giving the Project its power, the base of organizing work and tying up all loose ends is done by the MyBB Team.
To ensure this exponentiation yields the best product, we’ve recently brushed up and published the list of Roles, including ten non–management focus areas within the Team. Those now include separate teams for testing and developer relations, in adjustment according to the direction we’d like to take.
While those spots are often filled through invitation, if some of the listed activities pique your interest, tell us about it (the worst you’ll get is a friendly nudge in the right direction on how to make a positive impact!).
If you’d like to keep up to date with various news related to MyBB development and the Project behind it on the fediverse, use our verified handle @[email protected].
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