Updates from the development team: April 25th, 2021

We publish regular development updates to let you know what we have been working on, as well as what's coming soon.

Roadmap

A quick overview of what the development team will be working on in the next few weeks.

Community features

We are working on events, forums, and pages for local communities. These features will significantly expand the ways in which users can interact with each other. These are highly integrated tools and so we will release them at the same time. Development on these community features started in March and we are aiming to release them by the end of May.

If you are interested in becoming a community leader, it's not too late to reach out to us by filling in the contributor form. If you are already heavily involved in a local travel community, please also reach out.

Mobile applications for iOS and Android

We're ramping up our effort to develop native mobile apps. We're currently looking for people experienced in the relevant technologies (React Native, Flutter, Swift/Kotlin, etc) to help us make solid architectural decisions before we move our development focus to mobile apps. If you have the skills to help, please fill in the contributor form below and we'll be in touch.

This process will take some time, but you can expect to hear more about these apps later this year.

Latest features and bugfixes

Here's a summary of a few of the bigger features or bugs we worked on over the past two weeks:

• Added ability to format text on profile using Markdown and fixed bugs in profile editing [#974, #1084]
• Added a page to edit email and set a password [#982, #1059]
• Reworked and simplified the signup process [#985, #991]
• Moved the contributor form to the app [#1027]
• Added option to accept or decline a friend request on the user's profile [#1091]
• Simplified the bug reporting process [#997]
• Removed option to change gender in settings to prevent abuse (you can still contact the support team to change it) [#1063]
• Implemented an age limit (18 years minimum) [#1038]
• Reworked image upload tool in preparation for images other than the profile picture [#1051]
• Improved logos, branding, and fixed styling bugs [#1025, #1039]

Stats

In the past month, 22 developers collaborated on building Couchers.org through over 650 changes that touched over 16 thousand lines of code. A warm welcome to the 6 new contributors who joined our development teams and contributed to the codebase.

None of this would be possible without our 100+ volunteers working in all areas of the project. The development teams would like to thank the rest of the core contributors for making our work possible.

Written by Aapeli. Published on 2021/04/25.

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