Extremely proud to finally announce the first steps in releasing our new corporate identity for the Flarum project. Months in the making while having had 9 meetings 😱 with UX and strategic consultants. Sometimes change has to be done carefully, sometimes you just have to be brave!
Going forward we have published our new logo and color style here on discuss for all of you to enjoy! This fresh and exciting new identity harnesses our ability to adapt to our environment as a flexible and powerful community framework.
A few of the decisions we made and why:

• Choose purple. Purple relates to luxury and ambition. We have shown that Flarum is a quality product and we have the ambition to offer a free, open source project at tremendous value for years to come.
• Choose flat. Flarum is fast, simple and free. Showing depth makes no sense if all you want to achieve is that simplicity and ease of use.

More changes are coming while we further finish our identity ahead of the stable release. Including typography changes, default Flarum layout and our intonation in our texts. We will update the website, documentation and other platforms (like merchandise and GitHub) as we go.
The team is excited with this new and fresh look. We'd love to hear your opinion on our approach.

There's not much here yet, we just released Beta 16 (RC 1) so go check that out.
We have our first Build 17 meeting scheduled and we'll update more once we've done that.

Greetings magnificent Flarumites!

"I believe we are most beautiful when we are constantly shedding our old selves and moving into new light."
-- Suki Waterhouse

Australian Southern Cassowary

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📣 The Release

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After a 2 month release cycle, we are excited to bring you Flarum beta 16! In addition to being packed full of features, fixes, and other improvements, this is a very special release because it is the first release candidate for Flarum 1.0. Essentially, this means that Beta 16 contains all the essentials needed to be considered stable; from here to the stable release, it's just fixes, cleanup, and additional improvements. Barring catastrophe, the next release will be the long awaited Flarum stable!

🔔 What’s Changed?

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This release was geared towards stabilizing the extension API and completing some important refactors in our code base, but it also comes with multiple improvements to the end user experience and the great developers in our community. Bringing us closer than ever to stable, here are some highlights:

• 🏋️ Support for PHP 8.0! support for PHP 7.2 has been dropped. (flarum/core#2507)
• ⬆️ Laravel components have been upgraded to v8, and Symfony components to v5. (flarum/core#2576)
• 🔍️ Search system has been split to searching and filtering. In the future, this wil be the foundation for a search drivers system. (flarum/core#2454)
• 🔑 Access tokens have been refactored. (flarum/core#2651)
• 🧯 Boot errors are now hidden. (flarum/core#2633)
• 📁 Extension categories have been simplified. (flarum/core#2604)
• 📝 Editor driver abstraction has been introduced! word is there is a WYSIWYG extension on the rise 👀
  (flarum/core#2594)
• 🔐 User edit permission has been split to groups edit, credentials edit and attributes edit permissions. We've also added checks to ensure that anyone trying to edit an admin's credentials or add/remove users to/from the admin group is an admin. (flarum/core#2620)
• 🛂 A permission to bypass tag count requirements has been added. (flarum/tags#111)
• 🧩 Extensions can now have optional dependencies. (flarum/core#2579)
• 🔁 Routes can now be overridden. (flarum/core#2577)
• 🥷 Some performance improvements have been made. (flarum/sticky#23, flarum/tags#120, flarum/core#2639)
• 🧪 Extensions can now run backend unit and integration tests with the newly introduced flarum/testing package.
• 🚧 More extenders (flarum/core#2483, flarum/core#2176, flarum/core#2587, flarum/core#2535, flarum/core#2533)
• 🐛 A seriously large number of bugfixes

There are a bunch more! If you're into this, feel free to scour our changelogs and releases for all bundled extensions on GitHub.

👨‍💻 For Developers

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If you are a developer please understand there are many changes (some breaking) in this release, make sure to read the full upgrade guide in our docs! Some key points:

• PHP 7.2 is no longer supported.
• The search system has been revamped and split into searching and filtering, this means many classes are now deprecated and will be removed in the next release.
• A frontend typings package for core has been released; to use it, run npm install --save-dev [email protected]
• Access tokens have been refactored, details can be found in the upgrade guide.
• Many events have been removed, please use the new extenders as replacement.
• The app helper has been renamed to resolve, and the event helper deprecated, a new package flarum/laravel-helpers has been introduced.
• Support for bootstrap.php has been dropped, use extend.php instead.
• Other changes are mentioned in the upgrade guide for this release.

Developers are urged to check the changelogs of relating packages when they discover issues. You can review the Beta 16 Upgrade Guide to ensure your extensions are up to date.
If you have any questions or run into any obstacles in upgrading, please open a new discussion in the Dev tag or find us in #extend on our Discord.

Please also read about our flarum/core version constraint recommendation to stable.

⤴️ Upgrading

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Before you run the upgrade, make sure to create a backup of your public/assets directory, your composer.json and your database!

Step 1: Ensure you are on version 0.1.0-beta.15 in your Admin Dashboard or by running php flarum info (use the previous release notes for upgrading from an earlier version)
Step 2: Uninstall every 3rd party extension that isn't compatible with beta 16 yet. You can check which extensions are compatible at Extiverse (it needs up to one hour after release to display compatible extensions) or use the extiverse helper.
Step 3: Disable the remaining extensions. Re-enabling them one at a time after you update will make it easier to debug if any issues occur.
Step 4: Run the following commands:

If Composer v1 (please upgrade to v2):

composer update --prefer-dist --no-dev -a --with-all-dependencies
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

If Composer v2:

composer update --prefer-dist --no-plugins --no-dev -a --with-all-dependencies
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

Step 5: Use your newly-upgraded Flarum site!
If you run into any problems, please open a new discussion in the Support tag. There may be discussions of similar issues, but open a new one anyway, it helps us get your specific problem resolved faster.
If the problem persists – we're here to help! Make sure to include the output of php flarum info. Please also include the output of composer why-not flarum/core v0.1.0-beta.16.

🙇‍♀️ Acknowledgements

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Flarum releases wouldn't be possible without a multitude of people, our thanks go out to all of them! Thank you...
To everyone who contributed code this release, especially @davwheat, @rob006, @ajaypayne, @w-4, @010101, @Qiaeru, @OrangeTurtle197, @skmedix, imzhi , daniellesniak, emamulkhan.
To our eagle-eyed bug reporters, especially @matteocontrini, @davwheat, @ajaypayne, @Justoverclock, @ornanovitch, @iPurpl3x, @Kakifrucht, @ctml, @Dem13n. harry-wg.
To the incredible team behind Flarum, including @luceos, @jordanjay29, @datitisev, @clarkwinkelmann, @tankerkiller125, @askvortsov, @SychO, @Kyrne, @Liberty, @Digital, @Pollux, @katos, @Ralkage, @ianm and @Deebug.
To every Open Collective supporter and Github Sponsor, but especially:

• Bitfalls
• KAV partners
• ecomscan
• Sridhar Kamma
• @BartVB
• Roman
• Glowing Blue AG

Your continued support is extremely helpful, being fundamental to stable development for Flarum! Help us become a sustainable project by backing us on Open Collective or on GitHub.
And finally, to you for your ongoing support and enthusiasm that keeps us all going!

Or should we name it cycle 16...
Anyway, beta 15 was just tagged with only three days of delay. The whole team will be taking some time off to enjoy the holidays. On behalf of all of them :
🎄Happy holidays 🎅

Hello my magnificent Flarumites!
With our last release, beta 14, having been delayed quite extensively, we knew it was important to get back into our habit of regular release cycles. Well within our estimation we today are proud to ship to you Flarum 0.1.0-beta.15!

“Don’t dream of winning, train for it!” — Mo Farah

Australian Tiger Beetle

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🔔 What’s Changed?

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The focus of this release was extenders for extension developers and some better internationalization support. A few user-visible highlights:

• 🎨 Admin dashboard refresh (flarum/core#2409)
• 🌐 Slug driver support (flarum/core#2456)
• 📛 New nicknames extension (flarum/nicknames)
• 🧩 A ton of extenders for extension developers to use (src/Extend)

Aside from a ton of fixes, there are many other improvements and new small features in most of our bundled extensions. Let us know if you discovered one or discover them by looking through the extensions changelog.md or releases page on GitHub.

👨‍💻 For Developers

---

If you are a developer please understand there are many breaking changes in this release, make sure to read the full upgrade guide in our docs! Some key points:

• MomentJS BC layer has been removed
• Policy system has been reworked
• Composer options have been added for new Admin UI
• The Flarum\User\Event\GetDisplayName event has been removed, use the display name driver feature of the User extender instead
• The base_path, public_path, and storage_path global helpers have been removed
• Other changes are mentioned in the upgrade guide for this release.

Developers are urged to check the changelogs of relating packages when they discover issues. You can review the Beta 15 Upgrade Guide to ensure your extensions are up to date.
If you have any questions or run into any obstacles in upgrading, please open a new discussion in the Dev tag or find us in #extend on our Discord.

Please also read about our flarum/core version constraint recommendation to stable.

⤴️ Upgrading

---

Before you run the upgrade, make sure to create a backup of your public/assets directory, your composer.json and your database!

Step 1: Ensure you are on version 0.1.0-beta.14 in your Admin Dashboard or by running php flarum info (use the previous release notes for upgrading from an earlier version)
Step 2: Uninstall every 3rd party extension that isn't compatible with beta 15 yet. You can check which extensions are compatible at Extiverse (it needs up to one hour after release to display compatible extensions) or use the extiverse helper.
Step 3: Disable the remaining extensions. Re-enabling them one at a time after you update will make it easier to debug if any issues occur.
Step 4: Run the following commands:

Now run the update all versions without installing (yet):

composer update --no-install --with-all-dependencies

[optional] If you'd like to add nicknames support:

composer require --no-update flarum/nicknames

Now install everything you've updated:

composer install --prefer-dist --no-dev -a

Last step is to run the database changes and clear the cache:

php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

Step 5: Use your newly-upgraded Flarum site!
If you run into any problems, please open a new discussion in the Support tag. There may be discussions of similar issues, but open a new one anyway, it helps us get your specific problem resolved faster.
If the problem persists – we're here to help! Make sure to include the output of php flarum info. Please also include the output of composer why-not flarum/core v0.1.0-beta.15.

🙇‍♀️ Acknowledgements

---

Flarum releases wouldn't be possible without a multitude of people, our thanks go out to all of them! Thank you...
To everyone who contributed code this release, especially @SychO, @ianm, nina-py, sl-kr, azibom, lhsazevedo, @w-4, @rob006, @franga2000, @Swader, @Littlegolden, qiaeru.
To our eagle-eyed bug reporters, especially @franga2000, @matteocontrini, @yulei745, @Rami-Sedhom, idk-pixel, lhsazevedo, @w-4.
To the incredible team behind Flarum, including @Franz, @luceos, @jordanjay29, @datitisev, @clarkwinkelmann, @tankerkiller125, @askvortsov, @SychO, @Liberty, @Digital, @Pollux, @katos, @Kyrne, @Deebug, @Wadera and @Ralkage;
To every Open Collective supporter and Github Sponsor, but especially Glowing Blue AG, ecomscan, Bitfalls, KAV partners, @BartVB, Sridhar Kamma, Project Alice and Forum WirsanSoizburg.
Your continued support is extremely helpful, being fundamental to stable development for Flarum! Help us become a sustainable project by backing us on Open Collective or on GitHub
And finally, to you for your ongoing support and enthusiasm that keeps us all going!