Updates from the development team: December 31st, 2021

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

It's been a while since the development team published an update! The end of the year is often a quiet period as contributors wrap up other obligations for the year and celebrete the holidays. We've also been working on a lot of under-the-hood upgrades, so the visible effects have been limited. Nontheless, we're looking at ramping up again in the new year and will be pushing to get a number of exciting new features out in the next few months!

Roadmap

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

Translations

We've started up the translation effort, and are working on translating the whole platform into 10 languages! If you'd like to help translate Couchers.org to your language, please fill in the translation form! You may already be seeing this on the site if your browser's default language is set to one of these languages, but in the coming weeks we will translate the rest of the platform as well as add a button for changing your preferred language.

Improved notifications

We're working on improved notifications so you will get notified if something happens in your community or an event. We will also implement granular notification settings to allow you to turn on or off notifications for each topic.

Under the hood upgrades

The web team is working hard on making some large-scale changes to the underlying frontend architecture in preparation for future improvements. This won't be a user-facing change and might even result in some temporary bugs, but it will allow us to improve the platform going forward.

Latest features and bugfixes

Here's some of the user-facing features we worked on since the last update:

• Messaging: you can now message anyone without having to be friends [#2090]
• References: it's now possible to write references without the surfer having to double-confirm [#2224]
• References: you can now write a reference on the day that the request finishes (instead of the day after) [#2102]
• General: added a pretty footer at the bottom of the page [#2071]
• General: added an dropdown menu on the top right corner [#2217]
• Messaging: messages are now sent when you click Ctrl + Enter [#2117]
• Messaging: you can now mark all messages as read using the double check mark button [#2094]
• Messaging: we now make links clickable within messages [#2124]
• Profile: the list of regions you've lived in or visited is now in a paragraph instead of many lines [#2262]
• Map Search: it's now easier to search for users [#2035]
• Translations: start web setup [#2093]
• Internal: preparations for server-side rendering [#1965]
• Settings: fixed up page margins [#2241]

Stats

Since the last update, 17 developers contributed to Couchers.org through 308 changes that changed 6.5 thousand lines of code. A warm welcome to the eight new contributors who joined in the project and helped out on 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

You can join our development team on GitHub at Couchers-org/couchers; or if you don't have time right now, give us a star to show your support! We work in the open and need as much help as we can get to build the next generation couch surfing platform!

Written by Aapeli. Published on 2021/12/31.

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