👀 v1.4 cycle
To kickstart this cycle I just went through a group of logged bugs in the repository and posted PRs addressing them to keep the number of reported bugs under control.

• Nicknames Extension Regexp Not Working as Expected (flarum/framework#3416)
• Search all discussion for button disappears (flarum/framework#3400)
• Cannot mention post with deleted author (flarum/framework#3427)
• Empty suspension message produces an email notification with the template variable visible (flarum/framework#3417)

v1.3.0 - Wombat

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📣 The Release

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With v1.2 having rolled out earlier this year, we quickly follow up with v1.3 after several chirurgical changes to how our developers work. With that behind us, we are able to bring to you our newest release.

• 🤸 Search now works with unicode characters (flarum/framework#3385)
  
• 🐛 Discussion slugger now takes into account forum language (flarum/framework#3387)
  
• 💥 Errors from within extensions no longer make Flarum crash but trigger a visible warning (flarum/framework#3349)
  
• 🚤 Post number calculation is moved to the database which improves stability on larger communities (flarum/framework#3358)
  
• 🙈 Composer discussion title was not always clearly visible (flarum/framework#3413)
  
• ⌚ Timestamps for notifications are incorrect on servers that have a timezone different than UTC (flarum/framework#3379)
  
• 🛣️ Post permalink for subdirectory installs have duplicate paths segments (flarum/framework#3354)
  
• 🧑‍💻 And much much more... (diff)
  

👨‍💻 For Developers

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All extensions compatible with Flarum 1.2 should work with 1.3. We have completed all typings and typescript components so these should be easier to use in your own code. A complete list of all changes for developers can be found on the Upgrade Guide.

⤴️ Upgrading

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

Before starting the upgrade process, ensure you are on Flarum 1.0.0 or above in your Admin Dashboard or by typing php flarum info. If you're not, use the previous release notes for upgrading from an earlier version.
To upgrade from a version 1 Flarum to version 1.3, take a look at our upgrade guide documentation. The process should be much easier compared to previous major version upgrades, due to the lack of breaking changes.

If you run into any issues, please open a new discussion under the Support tag. Ignore similar discussions, and open a new one anyhow. Make sure to mention the output of php flarum info, composer why-not flarum/core v1.3.0, and any errors to their fullest.

😇 Thanks to our Sponsors

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Financial donations keep Flarum alive and kicking. The following companies and people deserve credit for making Flarum sustainable:

• @blomstra
• @glowingblue
• Sridhar Kamma
• @linc
• @hrvoje_hr
• @davwheat
• @jaredwolff
• @matteocontrini
• Donald Broussard
• @BartVB
• @ange1k
• @Edmilerad
• Melody Marks Inc, Leon Kükel, @GreXXL, @SKruIJ, Lay Dominicans of bl. Michał Czartoryski, Ken Lam, Timotheus Pokorra, @Hari, WhatTheHost-Dev, JGupta, @askvortsov, @Wadera, @zgq354, @tankerkiller125, @malago

Thanks for being awesome 😍 !

🙇‍♀️ Acknowledgements

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Flarum wouldn't be the same without our over one hundred contributors, along with their generous time commitments! For this release we specifically thank these wonderful people:

• Code contributors: @therealsujitk, @ianm and @datitisev.
• Documentation contributions: JeremyStar, @datlechin, Francis Lavoie, MichaIng.
• Core Developers: @askvortsov @SychO @davwheat @datitisev @tankerkiller125 @luceos
• Quality Assurance: @katos @Deebug @ianm
• Community Staff: @jordanjay29 @Prosperous
• Translation team: @GreXXL @Justoverclock @rob006
• Everyone who's submitted carefully described issues and suggestions.
• And the whole community sharing their passion for Flarum, urging us on!

🆘 Support the Project

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We need your support to:

• Guarantee continued development on the software.
• Create a valuable ecosystem around the project.
• Ensure healthy extensions are available.

You can support us:

• 👕 By getting some swag from our merchandise store!
• 💵 By backing us on Open Collective or on GitHub.
• 👩‍💻 By contributing to the source code, hop onto any of our open issues.
• 📈 By creating your own Flarum extensions and sharing them with the world!
• 🌎 By translating Flarum and extensions into your own language.
• 💝 By sharing your love for Flarum with friends, family and on the internet.
• 💬 By hanging out with us, here on discuss and on discord!

If you're looking to get coding, make sure to check out our documentation.

This discussion acts as a way for people to subscribe to announcements on releases. Before stable we would announce releases as separate discussions, because all changes were bundled and released as one beta.
Having passed that milestone we have already released several patch releases for v1.0. These releases were announced either in the v1.0 release announcement or in the Dev Diary. We felt this is not the right place.
From now on we will announce ALL releases, no matter the size, in this discussion. 🔔 So make sure to follow.

• ⏰ Releases for Flarum and all bundled extensions are announced here and/or linked to.
• 🔇 Comments are disabled. Please open a discussion for feedback or support.

Previous Release Announcements

• Flarum 1.0.0 Released
• Flarum 1.0.1 Released - minor patches
• Critical security update to Flarum core, with new incident write-up (v1.0.2)

📖 Introduction

Welcome to our newest community update. In this edition we want to take a closer look on how to bring your Flarum community to the next level. Also - like you are already used to - we will share interesting updates on the Flarum ecosystem, including the newest plugin additions. In Edition 1 of our community updates 2022 we have been looking on hosting options for Flarum - feel free to skip back to this post in case you are interested. But now lets move on to our newest update.

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🖥️ Making more of Flarum

With the basic installation of Flarum you are getting a great - and very modern - community out of the box. We have been highlighting extensions in this format for a while now. Adding extensions can give you a great deal of additional functionality that might be beneficial to your community. Today we don't want to look at new features that you can add to your community - but rather look at technical improvements that can easily enhance you - and your users - experience with Flarum.

💽 Queues - synchronously vs asynchronous

With the default installation of Flarum requests are handled synchronously. To better explain this an example: If there are many people subscribed to updates of a post - sending a reply will let the user wait until all notifications have been sent. While in a small community this poses no disadvantages, there are going to arise problems when your community starts to grow. The easiest way to achieve an improvement is to install the database queues extension. There is a great description on what this plugin does when you follow the link. Basically it makes those requests asynchronous - improving performance a lot. There are also more complex solutions available for larger community, using redis queues & cache.

🗓️ Running the scheduler

Also when installing extensions you might see the need to run the Flarum scheduler in the background. This service is provided out of the box - but you have to make sure that you have started it. There is a well written guide available, also showing some extensions that use this functionality.

🔎 Supercharging Search

In a growing community your demands for the built-in search might grow. In such occasion you might be considering an extension that integrates Elastic Search into Flarum. This will allow for a very performant fulltext search within your growing community.

📰 Other News

Winning 20i Awards for 'Community & Social' 2022

We are very happy that we were able to win the 20i Award for Community & Social software 2022. This shows the tremendous progress that has been achieved within the recent month and years! You can read more about the awards on the respective website.

📣 Flarum News

Version 1.3 of Flarum has been released. You can read more about it on the dedicated release announcement.
This version includes many improvements for international communities in search, tags, slugs, etc.

Also there is a new and simplified way to leave your feature suggestions here on discuss. This also introduces the possibility to upvote requests so they get the most attention by the team. Read all about it in the announcement.

🕸️ Extension Highlights

New & Noteworthy

Open Source Extensions

• Typewriter Sounds by @clarkwinkelmann a fun little way to bring sound to writing
• Offline Indicator by @datlechin showing users if they lost connection
• Scout Search by @clarkwinkelmann integrating Flarum with Scout Search
• Only Starter by @SwaggyMacro only showing the topic starter replies
• Apple SignIn by @blomstra adding oauth login with Apple ID

Premium Extensions

• Duplicate Discussions by @Justoverclock warns users before creating a potentially duplicate discussion

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🏁 Final words

We hope you have liked this edition of “Community Updates”. Looking forward to your comments and ideas for future updates. We are going to pickup speed again and hope to see you soon on the next edition of Community Updates.

Flarum is a beautiful piece of software; we're here for that reason, you are here because you appreciate it. But beauty has many forms.

The beauty of extensibility, no bloated content management system.
The beauty of its mobile-first approach, user interaction on mobile or handheld devices is excellent.

Yet beauty also exists in a technical sense when you look at the underlying quality of the code, and especially when we talk about security. Using well tested components like those from Symfony and Laravel, reduces the risk of security vulnerabilities in Flarum, yet we can always do better.
Security is at the heart of any widely-used project, and that includes Flarum. The core team only has limited ability to research, identify, and fix possible vulnerabilities within our code, and our familiarity with the project means we may make assumptions about areas of code without second thought to possible exploits which may be present. Auditing allows us to more confidently deliver Flarum to everyone -- from businesses, individual forum administrators, and end-users -- and lets you have more faith in the safety and security of the project.
For this reason we have opened a new fund, to give special attention to security in Flarum. Our goal is to invest heavily in recurring audits and commissioned security fixes. To get this arranged we need hard cash. Auditors do consider discounts for open source, but still don't work for free.
Find the fund on our Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/flarum/projects/security-audits
As a result from this security focused fund:

• we will be able to identify security issues ahead of them becoming a problem
• we can solve vulnerabilities in a targeted way using clear auditing reports
• our team will be able to build better software, less prone to security vulnerabilities
• we can label our software as audited by professional security researchers

Depending on the budget, we will request a security audit immediately after each minor (1.3, 1.4) and major (2.0, 3.0) release so that we are on top of any vulnerabilities at the soonest opportunity. The resulting audit report and discovered vulnerabilities will be kept private for as long as we work on their respective patches. Such patches will be prioritized above other work and released as soon as possible. Once these vulnerabilities are resolved, we will share the reports with the community. Later this year we will open up a partner program for parties relying heavily on Flarum, these partners will get a copy of these reports immediately when available.