It is that time again. Yesterday, we signed off our third preview: Preview 3. This update contains a couple of nice new features. It’s also the first preview following our new update scheme. Either way, it isn’t as big as an update as Preview 1 and 2. More changes come to Preview 3 in future updates.

Update scheme
First off – and this is not a feature – you’ll see us release updates on a more regular base. We’ve planned 2 more updates for Preview 3 this month alone. Perhaps a third one will come in early March. After that, we hope to have reached a point where we can say: yes, this can be Preview 4. And ya’ll know what comes after Preview 4, right? Beta 1.

Theme Engine 6 Preview 3
We made major improvements to our Theme Engine 6 once again. We now support parent themes. This means that one theme can inherit everything from another team unless it overwrites this within itself. We’ve included a very nice example in Preview 3. Further, we now also support more customization, especially Inbox has been improved. Again: more changes to the engine are coming, don’t start developing your themes yet. Another change this update brings is that users can no longer select a style for their own.

Sunset and Sunrise
Sunset is a new theme in Preview 3. It uses Sunrise as its parent. Sunset is a more classic way of doing things, with forums and categories only on the index. Subforum support is included, through. On its turn, Sunrise got some changes to support child themes. We’ve made some major improvements to the responsive design of Sunrise, too. Keep in mind that both Sunset and Sunrise are still a work in progress.

Login for Backstage and update
We’ve added a login interface for the Backstage. In case your theme might break the Mainstage login form, you can always fall back on this Backstage replacement for it. We’ve also used the same design for our new update dialogue.

Security improvements
Further, the Backstage will now ask you to remove install.php for security reasons. We’ve also fixed another security bug.

Inbox
We’ve also made some major work on Inbox. We’ve decided to take a distance from Contacts and Lists and only provide the PM feature. However, not just thing that got removed: we’ve merged the Inbox page with the profile. In the next preview, you’ll find even more improvements to the interface of Inbox.

Soft delete
Preview 3 comes with support for soft delete. With this feature, you can remove posts from sight without removing them from the board. The current implementation only changes the post’s design to a yellow variation on reported posts. Preview 3 Update 1 will improve the implementation and actually hide the post from members. A new permission will be added to groups, and moderators will be able to soft delete posts by default. It will also be possible to re-enable these posts.

Components
Further, we’ve updated Bootstrap from version 3.3.1 to 3.3.2. Font Awesome also got updated from version 4.2.0 to 4.3.0. However, we do not include all Font Awesome styles anymore. We’ve removed a couple of font formats to reduce the size of the Font Awesome package. Bootstrap got trimmed too. We’ve removed support for Glyphicons as we didn’t include them anyway. No worries, the final release of Luna 1.0 Aero will load Bootstrap, jQuery and Font Awesome from a CDN and include all support you might need.

More changes
Futher, we no longer show the Moved-entries from topics on the index. The editor got some minor interface improvements. The user list got a facelift and the Theme settings page has been improved. Emojis now have a default size of 16px instead of 14px and we made major improvements to the database. We’ve also added the first notifications for users (if you’re subscribed on a thread and someone comments on it, you’ll get a notification), decreased the size of our package and made improvements to the performance of Luna. Further, you can expect the usual bug fixes.

You can find the Preview at the usual location: on our websites download page. Continue to note that this is still a Preview release and bugs are to be expected. We’ll continue to make improvements and add new features to Luna in the coming months until we hit beta 1. After that, the fun can really begin. Expect Preview 3 Update 1 later this month and Preview 3 Update 2 around the end of this month or early March. Enjoy!

It’s that time again, a new release of Luna is available. We call it Luna 1.0 Preview 3 Update 1, for short Luna Preview 3.1. Or even shorter: Luna 0.3.3802. It’s what you prefer, we take all 3 of them. Either way, todays update is a small one, through it brings some nice things to the table.

Inbox improvements
We’re currently working hard on making the Inbox interface better, todays update contains a couple of these changes already, but more are to come. Either way, you’ll find yourself in a much improved interface, and a major fix to an interface that was still based on old markup.

Further, we’ve improved our conversation management in Inbox, you’ll find yourself with new tools and other improvements, like an improved interface (it was a mess in earlier Previews).

Notification Center improvements
Another interface we improved in todays update is the Notification Center. The buttons have been given a new place, an icon and a color for accessibility. Also, we fixed these buttons, as they where broken in Preview 3.

Language improvements
While language isn’t our focus until we get to Preview 4, we’ve already started with some cleaning. Todays build comes with less strings (the unused strings are removed, partially) and language fixes. More on this in the future.

Soft delete
As promised, Update 1 comes with improvements to Soft delete. You can now undo a soft deleted post, so that it will appear again for all users. We’ve also added new permissions for soft deleted posts, they don’t have any effect yet, but that’s for later.

Backstage
The Backstage has been improved in the Settings-area. Maintenance is no longer part of that category. It now has its own category in the main menu. The old “Maintenance” page also has been split up into Maintenance and Prune. You can also find our Database Management under this new category.

Theme Engine
Once again, we’ve added more freedom to our Theme Engine 6. This time around, you’ll be able to change more in Inbox and help. Also related to themes: Sunrise and Sunset have got a couple of updates too.

Search
Finally, we’ve made some improvements to Search, too. The result page now has a look that closer resembles the general forum lists when your results are displayed as topics.

And the usual bugfixes…

Either way, expect us to release Luna 1.0 Preview 3 Update 2, or Luna Preview 3.2 for short, later this month or early next month. Update 2 will be the final Preview 3-release, before moving to Preview 4, which will be our final alpha release (through it will get some updates, too).

It has been a couple of days again, and here we are, ready to release our next version of Luna. Luna 1.0 Preview 3 Update 2, or Luna Preview 3.2 for short. Or even shorter: Luna 0.3.3827. Today’s update brings once again some small improvements. And a new website.

Inbox improvements
Once again, we’ve improved Inbox further, this is probably it’s final major update for Luna 1.0. New in this version is that you can now alter the design of Inbox within your themes. Further, we made some small improvements to the system itself, too.

Check for updates
Starting with this version, the Update check feature is back for work and will warn you of new stable releases as soon as we hit Luna 1.0. For now, it will warn you when a new preview version is released.

Notification prune
You can also prune notifications with this update. You can choose to remove all seen, all unseen or all notifications at once. This is a very basic and rather drastic feature, but we have no plans to extend its capabilities for Luna 1.0. Stay tuned for Luna 1.1 for that.

Moderation tools
We’ve also finished off the move of the moderation tools from the Mainstage to the Backstage. They now have an improved design and some new capabilities that where missing in the previous preview.

Emojis and Emoticons
Starting with Luna Preview 0, we replaced the emoticons with emojis. This font-driven replacement for smilies had some issues through: not all platforms supported it correctly, especially Windows Vista-based computers (and Windows XP too, for the matter, but we simply don’t care for it as we do not support it anymore), through Windows 7 had some issues with them too. We didn’t remove emojis, instead, we’re providing a choice to use either emoticons or emojis, emoticons being the default. This build includes the old ModernBB emoticonset, through expect them to change design in a Preview 4 build.

Backstage interface
We’ve also made some improvements to the Backstage interface, once again. First off all, and most noticeable: we’re now indicating all options with icons, no more inconsistency with icon usage: everything uses and icon. We’ve also fixed some inconsistency in button naming (for example, some buttons where named “Delete” and others “Remove”). Secondly, we’ve changed some pages to have a more similar design to other pages (the Group page is a good example of that).

Other improvements
Finally, we made some code optimalizations, improvements on our coding conventions and of course the usual bugfixes.

And a new website
With today’s update, we’re also introducing a new website. For starters: we’ve added a first draft for the documentation. The documentation is mainly based upon the old ModernBB documentation with new additions, expect us to improve that during the coming weeks. Further, you’ll find yourself on a brand new index, we made changes to our About page, added a features-list, updated our roadmap (more on that in another blog post) and made minor style changes.

After a week of development, we’re ready to release our new preview: Preview 4.1, build 3935. We’ve spend some time on making a couple of improvements which we like to share with you. As we’ve said before, in Preview 4.1, we’ve started to finish all the hard work, and are shifting our focus to fixing bugs (through Preview 4.1 does contain some nice features).

Luna and Sunrise
First off, we’ve updated our Luna and Sunrise theme. Not just with a little improvement here and there, but with a rather big update. Perhaps the largest one since Preview 2.

With this new style, we hope to make Luna and Sunrise a little bit more friendly for the eye by displaying less white. We’ve also added some small shadows here and there. The topic lists have been updated to and now give feedback when your mouse is hovering over an item. Another improvement is the Improved support for smaller widths. Forum lists now also display if there are new posts in them.

For Luna (the theme), you’ll find something weird on the Theme settings page. The page will ask you to install Luna. This will add a couple of additional database entries in the configuration and allow you to change default settings. Important to note is that these settings, currently, do nothing.

Updates: Slow, Normal, Preview or Nightly
When visiting the update page, you’ll find yourself with a new option that allows you to check for slow, normal, preview or nightly updates. Slow updates are updates within the currently used branch that are stable, normal are all stable updates, preview is for the latest unstable alpha, beta or release candidate, while nightly is for versions that get updated more often. We’ve talked about this feature in our previous blog post. When you’re using the Slow or Normal branch, the core version will no longer be displayed in the Backstage.

Documentation
We’ve also updated our documentation on our website. We’ve updated information about the database. Another big change you’ll probably notice is that we’ve changed the index design and the page order.

Languages and bugfixes
Further, Preview 4.1 comes with multiple bugfixes, for the user list, themes, Inbox and other issues. Another change we made was improvements to the translation files.

Preview 4 Update 2
Next up is Preview 4 Update 2, in which we, once again, will be fixing bugs and finishing of our work. However, for Preview 4 Update 2, we’re planning to finish our work on the Luna and Sunrise theme. I hope all of you guys realize that we’re getting close to the final!

We’ve decided to make a little change to our original roadmap. The result is that you will be able to try out Beta 1 of Luna starting today. The first Beta is available now on our download page.

Beta 1 is all about translations. We’ve made some major improvements to the translation files. In fact, they are translate-ready. There is a note to it, through: this beta does not include the new strings. These strings still can’t  be translated. We’ve decided to clean up the current language file, and we will add all missing strings later, on the bottom of the Original English translation, to prevent any confusion, and to make translating as easy as possible.

Another focus point in this release was Random. We’ve made some major improvements to Random during this release, prety much all around. However, we’ve decided to not bind Random to the Luna release schedual. This means that, if Random isn’t ready before Luna 1.0 hits, it won’t be in Luna at all. We’ll probably release it later as a separate package before Luna 1.1, and include it in Luna 1.1 as soon as that version is released.

Further, we’ve improved our documentation further. Fixed bugs. And so on. Kind of the usual stuff. Beta 1 also includes some changes to make Luna more release ready, as in we’ve replaced some images and other stuff.

Roadmap update
Yesterday, we’ve decided to alter our roadmap. Why? Because we realized that in April, our project will celebrate its second aniversary. Something we want to celebrate with a new release. But we have nothing useful on the ModernBB-side of things, so the first logical release would be Luna 1.0. Luna 1.0 was originally planned to launch May 2nd, now it will be available on April 13th.

All coming Betas and RCs will be released every half week. We’ll update Luna every Wednesday and Saturday. So stay tuned, Beta 2 will land later this week.

We released Beta 3 a day earlier then planned, and that means that we got a day extra to develop RC1. Yes indeed, we’re now in the semi-stable “RC” stage. The final week of developing Luna 1.0 starts today. And while you might expect RC1 to be as large as the extremely small Beta 1 and Beta 3 updates (Beta 2 contained quiet a lot of change), nothing is less true: RC1 comes with tons of improvements and fixes.

And these improvements are mainly bug fixes. Special thanks to Quy and other that reported these issues. We fixed 63 bugs since Beta 3 and now can bring you an even more stable experience with our Luna 0.8 release. It’s an amazing progression compared to Beta 3, and we are realy happy about it. However, it isn’t all bug fixes. We’ve also some other minor changes to how Luna handles some things. Here is a small list of the non-bugs that have changed:

• “About” has been cleaned up and no longer shows Preview/Beta-information like Preview/Beta-updates.
• The logo in “About” has been updated.
• When requesting your password with a wrong email address, you’ll now get an error instead of nothing.
• When you log in, you won’t be redirected to the Index anymore, but to the page you loged in from.
• The back-up system has been updated to support Luna.
• Back-ups are now named “luna-<date>” instead of “modernbb-<date>”.
• When removing posts from Inbox, you’ll now get to see a modal instead of another page that asks for confirmation.
• We’ve removed the (not working) options to edit or delete posts from conversations in Inbox.
• New installations will no longer add a note to the “Admin note” section.
• We’ve made small changes to the way the notification page identifies you.
• We’ve made some minor changes to our language files. So translators: be sure to check them out.

All these changes, combined with our very long list of fixed bugs, makes us think that we have a prety solid RC1 right here. Overal, RC1 comes with minor changes, a lot of minor changes. And that’s what a Release Candidate is ment to do. We didn’t had to fix major bugs that made Luna unusable, but that doesn’t mean that it is not important to update to RC1 if you’re on Luna 0.7 or below. Next week, we’ll release Luna 0.9, our second Release Candidate, and we hope our final, because the week after, it’s Luna’s time to shine.

RC2 isn’t going to be as big as RC1. We have, for now, just 6 more bugs to fix and we hope to have that done by RC2 so we can put some more focus to our documentation again. Meanwhile, we’ll kick off the development of Bittersweet Shimmer, you’ll see a lot of new branches appearing in our repository soon, including a “bittersweetshimmer” branch, like we have also an “aero” branch.