Updates from the development team: June 6th, 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.

Mobile applications for iOS and Android

We're looking for volunteers with experience with React Native, Flutter, or iOS/Android native development to join our mobile dev team. If you have experience with these tools, please sign up to contribute and help us make the right decision going forward! We will build prototypes for both then evaluate how they fit our architecture and development practices.

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

Invite feature and new signup flow

We will be redesigning the signup flow and creating an invite system to allow you to invite your friends and see how many people joined from your invitations.

Community features

We will start releasing features that are part of our local communities theme in the next few days, including discussions and a basic community page. We continue working on these features and will be releasing events, guides, and pages soon.

In the coming weeks we will also work with local community leaders and start establishing the initial communities on the platform.

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.

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:

• References: you can now write references after hosting or surfing, or for users you interacted in other ways [#713, #812, #1264, #1354]
• Profiles: implemented a list of regions (visited and lived) and languages so you can now select these from a dropdown (and soon be able to filter by mutual languages); please check we converted your values correctly [#926, #1196]
• Profiles: implemented default profile prompts to get you started writing about yourself! [#1284]
• Notifications: added a notification badge showing how many unread messages you have in the navigation bar [#1320]
• Profiles: combined the edit profile and edit home screens into one page under different tabes [#1200]
• Requests: implemented emails for changes in request status and for unread messages [#1302]
• Bug: fixed a bug where text wasn't correctly formatted in search results [#1331]
• Bug: fixed a bug in the backend which allowed some users to register multiple times with one email address (if it was written in different case), we got in touch with the four users affected [#1309]
• Infra: added a metrics collector to monitor system health and help us make sure the platform is fast [#1350]

Stats

In the past two weeks, 9 developers collaborated on building Couchers.org through over 13.5 thousand lines of code changed that touched over 314 files. A warm welcome to our new contributor who joined our development team 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.

Join the development team

If you're a developer, please join our team on GitHub at Couchers-org/couchers or just give us a star if you appreciate our work! All our code is open source and we need all the help we can get in building the new Couchsurfing™ alternative.

Written by Aapeli. Published on 2021/06/06.

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