Vanellope: 2 months of awesomeness behind us

So, 2 months ago, we made the first commit to Vanellope. Today, we’re working hard on this project to hit a usable state somewhere in June. That is only 3 months from now. So, let’s hope we will get there in time. Through I’m afraid we won’t. But hey, stay optimistic! We’re still in scheme, and release is still planned for early 2015. But let’s go over the current state. Also, if you’re more intrested in how it is going with ModernBB 3, you should read the last paragraphe of this post.

Vanellope Alpha 1 Development
Anyway, for Vanellope, we’ve decided to drop all code we made a week ago. Yes, everything is gone again. Anyway, we’re retriving a lot of it, like the design and basic features like the update check, new style page and more. We’re back to our original plan, to make this a clean rewrite. Sad as it is, the plugin system we hoped to get in there, won’t be happening and is now on track for a future release, through I can’t tell if that will be Luna, Yellow or any later release. We’re probably going to make it the main focus for one of the updates that are coming up.

Anyway, like said before, we’re still on track to get Vanellope out of development at the begin of 2015. Our first public alpha release is planned for June 2014, while the first beta should follow in August, and the first RC in November 2014. The final? Early January 2015 is your time! Stay tuned for more specific dates, through. When we hit the Alpha 1 milestone, we will give an updated on the dates.

Development of Vanellope is going fast. We’ve got our design, and it shines. We’re now working on the Backstage, setting up pages for the settings we’re going to support, the main structure of it and so on. We’re also working on a new installation script and a nice update script. Together, those 2 milestones form “phase 1″ of the development cycle for Alpha 1, “phase 2″ is the whole front-end: forums, categories, topics, profiles and so on. PHase 2 is supposed to start somewhere in April or May.

ModernBB 3 Final
In the world of the already released versions, development of ModernBB 3 has been quite these times. I know this, and I’ll be working on this in the near future, I hope to close some tickets this week and am now planning to release ModernBB 3 at the end of the month.

Moving on: our new roadmap

In the past couple of days, I’ve done various changes to the planned future of both ModernBB, Vanellope and the ModernBB Group in general. I’m prety happy to announce those changes today. The involve mostly arround (big) roadmap changes…

ModernBB 3.1 and 3.2
First of all, we’ve added a new release to the ModernBB serie and renamed another one. ModernBB 3.1 is now called 3.2, while we also added ModernBB 3.1. Version 3.1 will be a minor release upon ModernBB 3.0 to fix multiple issues and improve ModernBB on certain points. All (or most) features planned for 3.1 are moved to 3.2.

Vanellope 1.0
For Vanellope 1.0, I’m trilled to announce that alpha 1 is now planned for early May, instead of early June. This means that the public test release will hit you guys 1 month earlier than originaly planned. It’s getting better through: Vanellope 1.0, the final release, is now planned for November 2014, instead of January 2015! We’ve revised our scheme because our plans where changed too!

Also, it will be possible to update from ModernBB 3 to Vanellope! With some minor changes you have to apply manualy to the database, through we will release a small tool for that too!

Vanellop 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3
Vanellope 1.1, the Luna Update, is now planned for winter 2015 (read: January/February). Our Yellow Update now carries version number 1.3 and is still planned for the summer of 2015. We’ve added a release in between, version 1.2, whose name will be revealed soon. 1.2 and 1.3 are supposed to be smaller updates, where 1.1 will be the update that contains everything that isn’t finished when we want to release 1.0.

I hope you guys are happy with those changes, as we now have planned 3 major updates (ModernBB 3.1, 3.2 and Vanellope 1.0) for this year, and 3 or more updates for 2015!

Vanellope – it could happen

So, we’ve been working on this for a while now, let’s do a quick recap of everything that happened the past 1,5 months, because it is prety big, what has happened. We’ll talk about development, planning, branding and more.

Branding
So yeah, we’re now calling Project Luna “Vanellope”. Nothing new here, we’ve been doing that on our site for a while now, yesterday however, we pushed this also to the actual project (which was using both Luna and Vanellope as branding). Since we already have a codename that’s also name Vanellope (update 1.1), we’ll give version 1.1 codename Luna instead, just to make it more clear. The repository will also be moved in the near future. You won’t find it anymore at github.com/ModernBB/Vanellope, but at github.com/Vanellope/Vanellope. We have got our hands on the Vanellope username on GitHub. 🙂 We’ll fix that last branding issues on our site in the upcoming week.

Planning
So, a couple of days ago, the Vanellope project page on ModernBB.be was updated with Yellow, update 1.2. This will be the second update for Vanellope, planned to launch in the summer of 2015. That’s a while from now… Just like Luna (which is now update 1.1), this release will add features that didn’t made it to our first stable release. Update 1.3 and update 1.4 will be released in Fall 2015 and Winter 2015/2016 respectivly, from there on, we want to have 3 major updates each year (kind of WordPress-like).

Version 1.0 itself didn’t change that much on our schedual. In fact, it stayed the same, we’re still planning to launch our first alpha somewhere this summer, probably in June. The beta, RC and final stage are also still on their usual dates. Anyway, we’ve also some news on when we won’t support ModernBB anymore: support will end after the Luna update has been released. That’s a year from now. Meanwhile, we’ll finish ModernBB 3.0 next month and might release another ModernBB 3.1 update.

Development
This is a very exciting part of the past month. Development of Vanellope has taken of over a month ago, and we’ve made already more then 150 commits to the repository. Slowly, we are making progress in rewriting the whole ModernBB source, into a much more advanced piece of software. Currently, we’re working on striping down the features and making the core more simple. Then we’ll add everything again. Currenlty, we’re spending a lot of time on the design, the front-end is being reimagened and so is the Backstage (however, we’re not quit happy with it’s design). The front-end is looking good for now. Anyway, we do recommend to not use the Vanellope software on this early stage of development.