Welcome to the new year! We hope you had a good holiday season and are staying healthy. Two weeks ago we continued our development updates after a bit of a hiatus, and the year has taken off on a good start. We're excited to share with you some progress we've been making on the product side!

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.

Merging of the landing page and platform

We are hoping to merge the landing page and the platform over the next fortnight. We've already begun some of this work and are just completing the rewrite of some custom pages, as well as cleaning up some technical issues.

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.

Latest features and bugfixes

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

• Login: made password mandatory on sign in and sign up to avoid the continuous confusion they cause [#2364]
• References: added a link to write a reference in email notifications [#2308]
• References: we now send a report to the support team if a user leaves a bad reference [#2302]
• General: added a feature preview page showing the latest features we're testing out before deploying them to everyone [#2288]
• Web: we've merged in the large under-the-hood update to the web frontend technology [#2146]

Stats

Since the last update, 25 people contributed to Couchers.org through 324 changes that changed 27.8 thousand lines of code. A warm welcome to the dozen new contributors who joined in the project and helped out on the codebase!

None of this would be possible without our 120+ 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 2022/01/16.

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