With the release of MyBB 1.6.13, the team felt there was a need to address some issues that affect the future of the Project, the Community and the Team in general.

Developers and MyBB Development Workflow

With the departure of Nathan and Tomm, MyBB has once again found itself in need of active team members. This, along with the unavailability of most current developers due to time constraints caused by life issues, led to us breaking our workflow, which as you may have noticed ended up delaying the release of MyBB 1.6.13. After MyBB 1.6.13 was out, work on 1.8 Beta 1 has been resumed (and you can clearly see that by examining the commits made for on github in the ‘feature’ branch).

Moving forward with 2.0.

Initially 1.6 was supposed to lead to 2.0 directly, but with the team feeling that 2.0 was still in very early development, MyBB would lose to its competitors for quite a bit of time (the development time of 2.0). Thus, work was put into “modernizing” the look and feel of 1.6 before the complete rewrite, and so 1.8 was born. As anticipated, this has delayed work on 2.0 of course. Once 1.8 is released (Beta 1 is nearing its completion; at time of writing only one feature is left to finish: jQuery conversion; all the other open issues aimed for Beta 1 are bugs) work will start on 2.0. There has been a lot of talk of MyBB being a “dead project”, but this is very far from the truth. As an open source project, as long as we have active developers, the project will never be “dead”. But we need the community’s help – we’ve been helping you for a long time, we’re asking you to help us now  – so if you feel that you know MyBB pretty well but most of all, if you feel that you have value to give to the team and project, contact us!

Changes that we are implementing now

It became apparent to us, that one of the major problems we have had was losing key team leaders. As you may remember, we recently got rid of the “Team Leader” role, and went with a more equal structure. This did not promote (as we had intended) productivity. So we have come up with a new system, whereby developers will take turns taking the “lead” on a per version basis. This will keep them all updated with the procedures required to package and release new versions. We are pleased to announce the Stefan T will be assuming the role of Lead Developer first and and the next should be Pirata Nervo (after that a new internal poll will be made). We are also pleased to announce that King Louis will be assuming the position of SQA team lead (the leader here doesn’t change as we believe the SQA team requires a static leader).

Recruitment

As mentioned above, we are now looking for more active members for both Development, Support, and more importantly SQA (we’re running low here!).  If you feel that you would be a good addition to the team, why not submit some pull requests on Github and/or drop an application to using the contact form, posting a thread in Private Inquiries (recommended) or even by PM’ing us.  You cand read more about the responsibilities here. Do not be afraid of contacting us, we won’t bite you – but we’ll be always be honest with you.