MyBB has been making some changes lately, and if you haven’t noticed we’re here to give you the scoop. Discussion about bridging 1.x closer to 2.0 has been settling, and as such we have decided on the best course of action moving forward. This comes with some other updates, including the main site going responsive, our blog getting way more fun, setting up an official demo site, and speeding up that darn extension approval process.
MyBB.com
If you’ve browsed our site lately on mobile, you may have noticed that it can be a real pain to navigate. We believe it is time to change that. Rather than awaiting MyBB 2 to bring our website into the modern age, you can expect it to be updated very soon. The new site will feature a few things:
- Modern Design – We are making sure to get the site up to modern design standards.
- Fully Responsive – This is part of a larger goal to get all MyBB products responsive, we’re starting with the main site.
- SEO – Finding pages on MyBB should be a much better experience through search engines.
If you have some time and want to leave some feedback, or if you just want to look at the new design, please visit the thread or repository linked below. Thanks!
Blog
Our blog will be getting some love as well. We’re now creating our blog posts via a repository on GitHub, so you can help (Or just get a sneak peek at what the next blog will be about). If you have an idea for a blog post that we haven’t done yet, or think we could be doing something better, feel free to open an issue in the repository linked below.
Official Demo Site
You may or may not know this, but we keep the community forum as vanilla as possible so users can get a feel for what MyBB is, right out of the box. Unfortunately this limits some decisions we make where improving the community forum is concerned. Not only that, but it limits how users can explore a vanilla MyBB installation as well. We are going to be creating a demo website to solve both of these issues, allowing you as users to browse a clean installation of MyBB easily. Obviously these demo installs will be lacking a couple of features that a full blown install contains, such as the ability to install custom themes and plugins – this is purely a security precaution.
Providing a clean demo system for users also opens up the possibility for more changes to be made to the official community forum – such as updating the styling to fit in with the rest of the website – in the future.
You can expect work to begin on this project after the new website has launched. Stay tuned for further updates!
MyBB Extensions
Approval Process
It’s no secret that getting a modification approved on the MyBB website can be a slow process. The main offender for this is our mission to make sure submissions are safe and of good quality, which means exploring the code and installing them for ourselves. This just isn’t a sustainable practice and results in a lot of frustration.
To speed up your addon submissions, we’re going to be easing our policy for allowing submissions. The policy has been published in our documentation, check it out at the following link.
If you find an issue with one of these unapproved addons, or even one that has been approved, please report it to us via the Private Inquiries forum so we can investigate properly.
Paid Modification Support
We are also taking a look into our support of paid modifications. In the past, these have been banned from being posted anywhere on the forum. Paid authors create some great things, so we’d like to embrace them more going forward. Our current solution is allowing paid modifications in the Requests/Services/Jobs forum, which you can find below.
We’re also considering the possibility of adding thread prefixes to the Requests/Services/Jobs forum in an effort to easily distinguish the types of services available. If you have any suggestions regarding these categories, we’re all ears!
MyBB Software Development Path
After a lot of discussion internally, on the forum and in Discord, we’ve decided on the path that the MyBB software will be following leading up to MyBB 2. While we can all agree that MyBB needs to be more modern, rewriting it entirely from scratch is an enormous task and is taking much longer than we anticipated. Judging from the input from users, as well as discussion among staff, our best option moving forward will be to further bridge the 1.x series toward MyBB 2, while updating it to be more usable and modern.
We have not decided on any specifics, but have discussed some of the following options:
- Use Twig
- Use Sass
- New, responsive theme
- Improved user experience, meaning changes like alerts or conversations
All that we know for now is that the MyBB 1.x line needs to be improved, and we need your help on deciding what exactly will be changing. If you’d like to join in on the discussion, head over to the forum thread we’ve been using to discuss the software.
Moving Forward
Overall we think these changes will help bring MyBB into the modern age, and make things a lot more fun to take part in. We love reading what you, the users of MyBB have to say and take it all into consideration. If you’d like to have a discussion with us, please hop on Discord and let us know about it!
MyBB Blog 
I find it incredible that in 2017 MyBB still isn’t natively responsive or with some sort of mobile view. Good job on deciding to address that.
In regards to paid plugins, I hugely suggest some sort of scheme as PrestaShop implements.
A repository where MyBB gets a cut (even if it’s simply to cover costs). Yes, it presents some difficulties, but an organized, well presented plugin “shop”, due to possibility of monetary gain by plugin makers, ultimately will bring about motivation to create higher quality mods with more regular updates.
Yes mobile is a must and I’m glad we’re finally moving there.
I don’t see a mods site happening that we would have to moderate and maintain (Meaning hosting the plugins there), at least in the near future. But for now we would like to figure out the implications for linking to paid plugins on the mods site.
I am really happy that it will be a new modern MyBB,
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I find it with great happiness that you’re finally moving towards accepting paid plugins and themes. I feel like many developers, like myself, have contributed with tens of paid plugins/themes to the community, with some of them being the best at doing what they do, yet they were not officially allowed to be accepted or promoted within the community.
I agree entirely. You rely on MyBB gaining users just as we do. Hopefully we can better support all extension developers in the future.
Agreed. I’ve never understood the backlash against paid modifications. I’m glad that we’re finally taking positive steps forward in that regard.
I feel the same for theme and bigger problem is with support for theme as whenever there are updates, we can never inform users about the theme updates and also there is no such thing as revision number for theme updates like there is for plugins. Paid theme is really difficult to handle because of these reasons.
Yes, we have plans to fix themes as well. Not just displaying them, but even the interface for upgrading MyBB versions, and the template changes that it imposes on themes. Like anything else it will take time, but know that we’re working toward improving it!