Round-up #10 – Planning ModernBB “Odd” 3.0

ModernBB 2.2 has been released! And, of course, we’re already planning the next version, for a while, to be exact. I mentioned ModernBB 3.0 a time ago in round-up #9, but now, it’s going to be serious. ModernBB 3.0 is the next big milestone for ModernBB. Let’s talk about ModernBB “Odd” 3.0.

Ambition: 100%
ModernBB 3 will be a very important release. Seriously. We’ve got a lot of thing planned. It won’t be a visual big release compared to ModernBB 2 (which turned out to be buggy, lots of issues have been fixed in ModernBB 2.2.1 and onwards). However, we do plan a visual rework of the Backstage, but not that much is planned to change on the other side of the software, our front-end. However, we’re planning to do a lot of work with ModernBB 3, that’s for sure.

ModernBB goes Modern
With our responsive design, we’re one of the first bulletin boards to have this by default. Compared to a lot of other forum software, we also have a prety good construction for our Backstage, where other forum software might be complicated (phpBB refference). However, there is still a lot to do that makes us even more modern. What about SQLite 3 support? We planned this already for ModernBB 2.0 and 2.1. This since support for it ended before the feature was finished, that didn’t turn out well. For now, it seems that this feature will only find it’s way to ModernBB 1.6, 2.2 and 3.0.

But that’s (of course) not everything. We’re planning to create a hook system, so no core changes need to be done. The editor will also be replaced with a more feature-rich WYSIWYG editor. Meanwhile, updating should be very WordPress-like: one click, and go! The parser will be updated once again, for example, support for syntax highlighting. And the login form will disappear and be replaced with a modal (in most of the cases, at least). The template system is also supposed to get a major reform.

Further, ModernBB 3.0 will use jQuery 1.11 and Bootstrap 3.1.0 (at least). Since development of ModernBB 3 will take a while, this might change to even newer releases, like jQuery 1.12 and Bootstrap 3.2 (or something like that). We’re also not yet sure if we stay in the 1.xx branch for jQuery, so we might upgrade to jQuery 2. That also means that support for Internet Explorer 8 will be dropped, however, that’s still a major browser. With Windows XP getting close to EOL, that might change before ModernBB 3 is released, but probably, this will be something for ModernBB 4.