Updates from the development team: July 18th, 2021

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.

Events and community building

We have started releasing parts of the events feature. For now, events are created by admins manually, but we will add functionality for creating and editing events on the platform in the next releases. If you'd like to create an event, please get in touch!

We have started looking for Community Builders: couch surfers who want to grow their local community on the Couchers.org platform. They are responsible for creating content for their community, and bringing new users, and will form the backbone of the community growth plan. If you'd like to help build your local community, please fill in the Community Builder form.

Mobile applications for iOS and Android

We've started our mobile development team, but are still looking for contributors to join and help on development of the app, if you're interested, please fill in the contributor form.

We aim to get Beta quality apps out by the end of this year.

Latest features and bugfixes

Here's a summary of a few of the bigger features and bugs we worked on over the past two weeks:

• Events: released the first part of events, a read-only display of events created by moderators, more coming soon [#744, #870, #1218, #1543, #1584, #1620]
• Community Guidelines: we've added some brief Community Guidelines to help us build a safe and fun community together! [#1646]
• Signup: completely redesigned the signup flow to make it easier and more intuitive [#1324, #1510, #1646]
• References: we now send hosts and surfers reminders to write references after hosting experiences [#1623]
• Profile: replaced sexes (e.g. female) with genders (e.g. woman) after feedback from the community on the forum [#1641]
• Settings: added the user's username on the settings page [#1648]
• Admin: implemented a first set of admin tools for moderators and the support team [#1373, #1450, #1583, #1596]
• Profile: the avatar upload no longer requires you to scroll down and click "Save" to save the avatar [#1594]
• Requests: we fixed a host/surfing request ordering bug which possibly hid some requests for users with more than 10 requests of a given type [#1604]
• Signup and settings: we fixed a bug that was preventing users from signing up or changing their password
• Profile: your visited and lived regions are now sorted [#1632]
• Backend: migrated the backend from SQLAlchemy 1.3 to SQLAlchemy 2.0 [#1473, #1473, #1535, #1556, #1578, #1585]

Stats

Since the last update, 7 developers contributed to Couchers.org through 281 changes that changed 14.1 thousand lines of code. We welcome the two 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

If you're a developer, please join our team on GitHub at Couchers-org/couchers or just give us a star if you appreciate our work! All our code is open source and we need all the help we can get in building the new Couchsurfing™ alternative.

Written by Aapeli. Published on 2021/07/18.

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