NodeBB v0.2.1 has been released

By Andrew Rodrigues in NodeBB 0 Comment

In a nutshell: DBAL, MongoDB as an alternative DB, Notification Enhancements, tons of new Plugins, Access Control, more Language packs!

Check out the official release blog post here. Have you liked NodeBB yet on Facebook? :)

 

Happy New Year! New year, new NodeBB release :). Quite a few features made it in as well as a bunch of bug fixes of course. I think the ones I’m really excited about are the notification based enhancements. It’s easy to miss out on notifications if you are viewing a different tab, or have the browser minimized, so we added a couple of features to make them more prominent.

First off, we added a notification counter in the favicon:

favicon-notification

There’s a new plugin out called Desktop Notifications which alerts you of new @mentions, replies to your threads, new chat messages, etc. even if your browser is minimized. The only other app I know of that uses the HTML5 Notifications API is Gmail.

desktop-notifications

Interestingly enough, it works on mobile as well – sends you a push notification even if your browser is running in the background. Unfortunately, it seems like mobile browser support is fairly limited for now.

notifications_mobile

Click through to see what else was added in v0.2.1 :)

Three new language packs were added – French, German, and Spanish. I can’t wait to see what other languages get added – maybe on my own free time (although I’d rather be coding in new features on my free time) I might try adding a Malay language pack!

Access control was another big request that we’ve been getting. You can finally set read/write permissions for each category in the Admin Control Panel.

The biggest and most important feature of all in this release was the implementation of a Database Abstraction Layer. It’s a pretty exciting feature that @barisusakli worked on pretty much non-stop for an entire week. As you may know, NodeBB is powered completely by Redis, which is one of the many reasons why its super lightning fast. With the DBAL, we can add support for any other database software. We’ve even added MongoDB support out of the box, if that’s your thing.

 

 

New Plugins

We’ve got 25 plugins now, which is not too bad for only having launched the plugin system two months ago. Here’s a list of the new ones that came out since our last release.

  • Metro Tiles (Modern UI Inspired) [screenshot]
  • Desktop Notifications like G-Mail
  • Masonry Categories [screenshot]
  • Forum Importer
  • Keyboard Shortcuts
  • RSS Feed Importer [screenshot]
  • Topic Archival

I hope that we’ll have a ton more plugins to come this new year :)

 

p.s. Our premium hosting platform at http://www.nodebb.org is secretly out of closed BETA, so go ahead and sign up :) We’ll make an official launch announcement in the coming days, so stay tuned.

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