The NodeBB Team is proud to announce the release of NodeBB v1.0.0!
This milestone has been a long time in coming, and the previous release, v0.9.3, had been out for several months already.
Released several days prior was v0.9.4, a stability fix for users still on the older v0.9.x branch of NodeBB.
There are a number of breaking changes for both plugin and theme authors. These changes can be found in the “Breaking Changes” topic in our community support forum.
What does v1.0.0 mean for NodeBB?
The v1 launch for NodeBB signifies a number of things:
Versioning changes
While we’ve been “production-ready” for more than a year now, we’ve been approaching versioning mostly as an indicator of “relative difference” in versioning. That is, v0.8.0 to v0.8.1 is a small change, but v0.8.0 to v0.9.3 contains many changes and fixes.
We found that many users (or potential users) of NodeBB were viewing our versioning numbers differently, as more of a “progress” indicator. Where v0.5.0 meant we were “50% of the way there”, or “50% confident in our code”.
While this doesn’t reflect how we handled versioning, it does matter how others view the versioning, so hitting the big 1.0 is symbolic more than anything.
Semver
Up until now, we’ve stated that our versioning is as follows:
- Patch version bumps are for fixes and backwards compatible changes
- Minor version bumps are for backwards-incompatible changes to themes and/or plugins, new features, etc.
- Major version bumps did not exist
We’re now going to align with the semver method of versioning1:
- Patch version bumps will now contain small fixes and text copy changes only
- Minor version bumps will contain backwards compatible fixes (via upgrade script or with deprecation notices), updates to functionality, new features, etc.
- Major version bumps will now contain backwards-incompatible changes
Feedback
As always, we value feedback on our development practices, pacing, and governance of our open source project.
On our community support forum, We have a fantastic group of community reps helping new users with their NodeBB. We’re always looking for more regular posters, so if someone here has helped you out, stick around and pay it forward! Maintaining an account here is also a great way to hear about new developments to NodeBB as soon as they are made.
Do you speak multiple languages? Our translation project currently handles the localisation effort for NodeBB. A big thanks to Transifex for providing us with a free account as we’re an open source project.
Obligatory plug for our managed hosting service available at our main website. For hassle-free setup, installation, and maintenance of your NodeBB, reach out to us and get your community started today!
For the tech-heads out there, NodeBB can also be installed directly via the source code available on out GitHub repository. Want to help us out? Use our DigitalOcean referral code and you’ll get a month free, and we’ll get a small reward as well 🙂
1 Okay, technically, since we were pre-1.0.0, semver does have special rules that we followed, so technically, technically, we’ve been semver-compliant all along.