MyBB is NOT a community driven project

Recent activities in the MyBB community showed off, that MyBB is not a community driven project. The community is allowed to post suggestions for MyBB 2.0 but the developers are making the major decisions about the future of MyBB without asking the community.

Turns out that MyBB 2.0 will be developed with Laravel 5 and does use Twig as the template engine. The requirements are PHP 5.4 and MySQL 5 or postgresql.

The framework and template engine of MyBB are huge decisions as they have a major influence on the compatible third party components. You could easily integrate a content management system like Pimcore, if MyBB would use the Zend framework. Or integrate a picture gallery built with the Symfony MediaBundle with MyBB 2.0.
Of course this is still possible but it’ll require more effort for the integrating developers.

Especially plugin and theme developers will have to learn the Laravel framework and the twig template engine if they want to continue contributing to the MyBB world. If they decide against the chosen framework, they’ll soon be gone.

You’d have thought that there would’ve been a poll or a public discussion about such huge decisions but there have been none. MyBB development team member Euan T stated that two developers chose the framework when they started working on MyBB 2.0.
While he agrees that the community could have been more involved into the progress, he also states that the developers have no interest in writing blog posts and explaining major development decisions to the community:

MyBB 2.0 development

A few days ago another major decision has been taken by the MyBB development team without discussion with the community – they’ll switch the license for MyBB 2.0.

You can see that MyBB as open source software is not driven by the community but only supported by the community. Community members are allowed to find bugs and post suggestions but they have nearly no influence on the future of MyBB.

If you are using MyBB for business, you should be aware that major decisions will be taken without asking of informing the community at an early stage.

2 thoughts on “MyBB is NOT a community driven project”

  1. Hi, just wanting to clarify some points where you seem to have not fully understood my meaning on the community forums.

    “Euan T stated that two developers chose the framework when they started working on MyBB 2.0.”

    The choice of framework was actually a choice made by the whole team, with all of us contributing over a period of months – debating various different frameworks, whether to use a framework at all and more. We followed an RFC process within the team and Laravel 5 came out a clear winner with around 80% of the overall vote. We did not make the decision lightly.

    There were however two of us who started the initial process of creating the project and getting the initial code prepared.

    “While he agrees that the community could have been more involved into the progress, he also states that the developers have no interest in writing blog posts and explaining major development decisions to the community.”

    I only became the development team leader within the last few months, but since then you may have noticed some changes. We’ve started doing regular (monthly) blog posts (which you’ve covered here) and I’ve been fairly active within both the community on mybb.com and elsewhere trying to interface with our users. To me, that doesn’t say that we have “no interest […] explaining major development decisions to the community”. In fact, I’d say we’re currently the most open that we’ve been for a long time. Is there room for improvement? Yes, and it’s an ongoing process improving the procedures we follow.

  2. Thank you for this statement Euan!
    This is the first time that we do get some insights of the decision making process inside the development team.
    Keep up with the process of improvement and MyBB will definately become more open for the community.

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