Platform changes 2021 - Q2

luceos

We will utilize these "platform changes" discussions to announce updates to the communities, as well as report progress on upgrades and new features additions whenever possible. Please understand we do not publish everything we are working on, nor do we provide estimations for deliverables.

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Right now we are working on and hope to soon release:

The upgrade to Flarum 0.1.0-beta.16.
Offering all premium extensions inside managed communities. These premium extensions will be installed by default (if compatible with our current Flarum version) and can be activated with an active Extiverse subscription. You will need to provide an API token from Extiverse on each community for us to automatically validate your subscription. Blomstra premium extensions will remain free to use at all times on our managed communities.

luceos

I've just released the ability to use premium extensions, see this discussion for more information.

luceos

The release made yesterday was rolled back after some unforeseen issues that impacted performance.

A few minutes ago an improved version was deployed to all active communities. Premium extensions, again, are available. I will now look at our beta 16 upgrade so that we can prepare for Flarum stable and in the meantime improve the stability and performance of the platform. This also includes an issue with Byobu and the Payments extension.

luceos

In the last release we moved back to a previous implementation where sessions are stored in redis. Hoping this would improve our performance, it has an unwanted side effect of flushing all active user sessions whenever the cache is cleared. This happens when you clear the cache from the admin area, an extension is toggled or whenever a new version is deployed.

In the upcoming release we will return to database driven sessions to prevent this from happening. The consequence to performance is inconsequentially low.

luceos

The upgrade to beta 16 is complete and will be rolled out early next week once internal tests have shown no issues (eg the byobu one). This means we will also upgrade to PHP 8.

In addition we have refactored most of our logic of the skeleton (flarum/flarum) to slightly increase performance.

luceos

We decided to reconsider our implementation of the MySQL and Redis database. These changes will be applied the coming week(s). We won't be going out of early access before these changes have been applied and tested.

In the meantime we are already paving the way for an upgrade to Flarum v1 stable. Open source and premium extensions are undergoing an upgrade and where needed minor maintenance made or features introduced.

luceos

On behalf of Blomstra @[deleted] is pushing hard to make all Friends of Flarum extensions in use at Blomstra compatible with Flarum v1. In the meantime he and I tackle extensions that are a responsibility of Blomstra; including the Redis extension, payments and realtime. We hope to have everything patched up ahead of the release which can be expected in the coming weeks.

From what I heard @meezaan has made huge progress on the changes for MySQL with Redis soon being tackled as well.

luceos

I published the releases for our premium extensions (payments and realtime). @[deleted] is still working through the FoF extensions that are used on our platform.

Today we tested the migration from our dedicated, central database cluster to the database cluster specific for each community; we will start migrating production communities soon. Once we've completed that we will take care of the Redis modifications; which will conclude the required changes before an open beta.

luceos

luceos we will start migrating production communities soon

Most our communities are running on their own dedicated database cluster as we speak. We are monitoring the performance of these and will make adjustments where needed going forward.

A couple of production communities still need to be done once we informed our clients about the necessary maintenance window.

Once these have been finished we will implement the changes to improve the Redis configuration.

Pending the update from v17 development for their premium support extension, the Flarum v1.0.2 release is pretty much ready to go. We will release this update once the previous tasks have been completed.

Edit: All communities are migrated to their own dedicated database cluster.

luceos

Today we completed the preparations for the upgrade to Flarum v1.0.2 with all extensions we provide on our platform. This upgrade will be rolled out once the changes to the redis (cache, sessions and queue) have been deployed to prevent instability to the communities.

luceos

All our communities have been upgraded to Flarum v1.0.2 yesterday.

Today we've completed our test run in the redis changes, we will do another test with it before rolling that out.

Once the redis changes have been applied, we will update Flarum to v1.0.3 and include the release with all upgrades to extensions.

luceos

All active communities have now moved over to their own dedicated redis cluster.

luceos

Platform Changes 2021 - Q3.