June 23rd, 2018 at 9:15 AM
Shade here. Randomly got into this board, and since I was mentioned, I would like to clarify some points:
1) 2.0 was meant to be a breath of fresh air for MyBB initially, but it turned out too demanding for the current dev team which is lacking both time and people. Therefore, we put it on hold and moved our efforts onto an incremental updates model which we hope will mark little but significant steps ahead towards a more modern MyBB.
2) 1.9 will not break plugins completely. The key points of most MyBB plugins are not templates nor styling; hooks are the critical part instead, and they will not be changed (some of them have been dropped, but they are fairly minor). Therefore, whereas plugins will need to be updated to comply with the new Twig engine, they will require very little edits; furthermore, Twig allows for more customization and should also spell the end of one of the most ugly dev practice in the MyBB universe: that is, search and replace to inject code into templates. Twig is built around an extensible model; it will really step up devs' game to provide even more customization and quality.
3) the new theme is crucial given responsiveness is mandatory in 2018. Justin is a great designer and he has been working hard even without the whole set of templates converted; it's going to be fun now that the conversion is over.
4) our modernizing efforts also include other aspects than the software itself. Even if it seems MyBB development is down to 3-4 people, there is in fact quite a lot of activity going on "under the hood" by staff members who are working harder than you may think to ensure MyBB's evolution towards its brighter path. Kudos to them.
1) 2.0 was meant to be a breath of fresh air for MyBB initially, but it turned out too demanding for the current dev team which is lacking both time and people. Therefore, we put it on hold and moved our efforts onto an incremental updates model which we hope will mark little but significant steps ahead towards a more modern MyBB.
2) 1.9 will not break plugins completely. The key points of most MyBB plugins are not templates nor styling; hooks are the critical part instead, and they will not be changed (some of them have been dropped, but they are fairly minor). Therefore, whereas plugins will need to be updated to comply with the new Twig engine, they will require very little edits; furthermore, Twig allows for more customization and should also spell the end of one of the most ugly dev practice in the MyBB universe: that is, search and replace to inject code into templates. Twig is built around an extensible model; it will really step up devs' game to provide even more customization and quality.
3) the new theme is crucial given responsiveness is mandatory in 2018. Justin is a great designer and he has been working hard even without the whole set of templates converted; it's going to be fun now that the conversion is over.
4) our modernizing efforts also include other aspects than the software itself. Even if it seems MyBB development is down to 3-4 people, there is in fact quite a lot of activity going on "under the hood" by staff members who are working harder than you may think to ensure MyBB's evolution towards its brighter path. Kudos to them.
