Hello Forem Creators! It's been a very productive week for the Forem repository, with 30 pull requests merged. This cycle brought major new features, significant improvements to the admin experience, and a host of performance boosts and bug fixes. Let's dive in!
✨ New Features
This week saw the introduction of two powerful new features designed to enhance content creation and community management.
Scheduled Automations
A new system for "Scheduled Automations" has been added, allowing for time-based actions within a Forem. This foundational work opens the door for future features like scheduled post publishing, automated moderation tasks, and more. A few follow-up PRs were also merged to fix typing and data conversion issues.
Add scheduled automations
#22556
- [ ] Refactor
- [x] Feature
- [ ] Bug Fix
- [ ] Optimization
- [ ] Documentation Update
This integrates with community bots to be able to create things like automated github repo roundups and other forms of roundups, useful for subforems etc.
Backend Image Generation
To support richer social sharing and content presentation, we've added a new backend functionality for programmatic image generation. This can be used to create dynamic open-graph images, social media cards, and other visual assets on the fly.
Add backend image generation functionality
#22566
- [ ] Refactor
- [x] Feature
- [ ] Bug Fix
- [ ] Optimization
- [ ] Documentation Update
Adds service for image generation — no UI, controllers or anything like that yet.
🚀 Enhancements & Performance
Alongside new features, a significant effort was made to refine existing functionality and improve the platform's performance and architecture.
Admin Management (/manage) Overhaul
The /manage section received a lot of attention this week, with numerous pull requests dedicated to improving the user experience. This work included cleaning up styles, fixing sidebar overlap issues, improving edit functionality, and generally making the interface more intuitive for administrators.
Adjust /manage UX
#22536
- [ ] Refactor
- [ ] Feature
- [x] Bug Fix
- [ ] Optimization
- [ ] Documentation Update
Clarify language and fix edit form for /manage
Performance Improvements
To make the user feed faster and more responsive, individual articles within the feed are now cached. Additionally, a new database index was added to speed up queries related to users and their associated GitHub repositories.
Cache feed individual articles
#22533
- [ ] Refactor
- [ ] Feature
- [ ] Bug Fix
- [x] Optimization
- [ ] Documentation Update
Individual articles are shared across many feed request contexts, and even though we do need to initially query for the articles, once we know which ones we're going to use we can rely on a lot of cached data.
Shift to "Score" for Content Ranking
In a key architectural change, the platform is moving away from using a simple public_reactions_count for ranking content. A more nuanced score attribute will now be used, allowing for more sophisticated ranking algorithms in the future. A related change was also made to adjust the comment scoring calculation.
Change from public_reactions_count to score
#22531
- [ ] Refactor
- [x] Feature
- [ ] Bug Fix
- [x] Optimization
- [ ] Documentation Update
score is more appropriate for rankings because it reduces gaming — and we have more composite rankings built around this column.
🐞 Fixes & Refinements
A wide array of bugs and smaller issues were addressed this week, including:
- A potential race condition on the home page has been resolved.
- The long-standing issue with updating status posts has been fixed "once and for all."
- UI adjustments were made to the reading list's default state and the tag count display.
- Fixed a bug where user URLs did not work correctly on sub-forems.
- Corrected scoping issues with the reading list feature.
- The image upload process for navigation links was simplified.
Additionally, a number of smaller commits addressed test cleanups, migration fixes, and tweaks to local development scripts.
That's all for this week. A big thank you to our contributors for their continued efforts to improve the Forem platform
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