Talkyard Roadmap 2018-11-26

New roadmap, year 2020, here: https://www.talkyard.io/-339/talkyard-roadmap-2020

OLD roadmap below:

Here's what's what Was next for Talkyard. Feedback & change suggestions are welcome; you can add a comment below.

If you compare with the previous roadmap you'll notice that things have taken longer than planned — and that's one reason why I'll focus on making it simpler for open source people, or maybe paid freelancers, to contribute to Talkyard and speed up development.

Now (within 2 weeks)

• Done: Subscribe to categories. Then, can listen to conversations / questions related to to one's own team only, if each team = 1 category.

• Done: Make blog comments hopefully work with all tacker blockers out there, e.g. iOS and Privacy Badger. (Via cookieless guest login, for embedded blog comments.)

Somewhat soon (1 month)

• Done for now:   Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Traefik, Caddyserver friendliness. Making it simple to deploy custom changes to one's own server. See: https://www.talkyard.io/-163#post-14

• Done for now: Make it simpler for people to build Talkyard and contribute features.

Later (3 months)

• Done: (June 2019) Custom groups, and inheriting one's groups settings. So you, if you're an admin, can configure settings for many people, at one place (i.e. their group settings). 3 weeks?

• Doing now: (Mars, June 2019) Export & import site to JSON (so can migrate to one's own server, + Disqus comments import, + import ( = create) categories via API). Later: include uploaded images etc.

• Done for now: Fix onboarding problem: When a site owner logs in to his/her new site, it's often unclear to him/her what to do next. Add a UI tour that guides the new admin through the main important parts of the UI. Also, add a brief guide, for all new members, e.g. explain personal notifications, switching between the categories and the topics list, and searching for answers. 1 week?

• Basic theming. User friendly way to edit colors and make one's Talkyard site look like a part of one's website. 1 week? Slightly started.

• Configurable categories for blog-comments topics. (Needed for sites with both coments for blog posts, and a forum.)
  Update: (2019-08-06): This should now be fairly simple — I'm adding "external ids" for categories, and blog comments will by default be placed in whichever category has the external id embedded_comments. Also see [COMCATS] in the Talkyard source code.

• Cooperating on drafts: Will notifications get sent, if moving a topic from an unlisted category, to a visible category, to "publish" it?

• Done: (May 2019) Solve the too-many-connections problem happening if one opens many brower tabs. (Solved by subscribing to events via a single connection, from a service worker.)

• Done: (June 2019) Q&A friendliness step 2: Auto search for answers, whilst typing a new question title. 1 week?

Even later ... partly doing now (Aug 2019), see below

• Anonymous questions. Studets want to ask embarassing questions. Employees want to post crazy innovative ideas.

• Done, Aug 2019: Invite to group: When inviting a bunch of people via email, hav them auto added to the group you want. E.g. a Students 2019 group.

• Q&A friendliness step 1: Expand the search field, so can just start typing, to search. Show search results in dropdown, so won't need to jump to results page. 1 week?

• Invite friend button, in each topic. So people can quick-invite their friends and grow the community.

• Sub categories. 2 weeks? — now partly done (Aug 2019). Maybe 1 more week?

• Re-implement tags: change to ids, so can be renamed. Sort by tags in topic list. 2 weeks?

• Top navigation menu composer, and a hamburger dropdown menu, for items that don't fit on screen. And as forum title, optionally use an image / logo + Alt text [uolve]. 1 week?

• Doing now: (Aug 2019) ... mostly Done, Feb 2020, but only JSON export:
  Export site to JSON + uploaded images etc (so can migrate to one's own server). 2 weeks? Edit: This got prioritized, work started already.

• Doing now: (Aug 2019) ... Done: Import Disqus comments. import WordPress comments? (for people who use Talkyard for blog comments) 2 weeks?

• WordPress blog comments plugin. 1 week? 2 weeks? Complicated to create auto tests.

• Embedded forum categories. Blog comments can already be embedded in an iframe, and in some cases, it can be useful to embed a lst of topics in a certain category, too, on a page over at the main website. 2 weeks? Here's a topic about this.

• Assign topics to one or more people. (Issue tracker style.) 1 week?

• Rich text WYSIWYG editor. Non-tech people think Markdown+preview is confusing. Use ProseMirror — it can switch between Markdown+preview and rich-text-WYSIWYG. The WYSIWYG probably be made available step by step: first a simple version that doesn't support @mentions, for example. 1 month?

• Single Sign-On for embedded comments. (Single Sign-On for forum: Mostly done, the basic things work.) 2 weeks?

• More API endpoints: On request.

• Support file uploads to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. 2 weeks?

• Email replies. So can be used as a mailing list. 3 weeks?

• More granular notifications: Get notified if a problem gets solved / feature gets implemented — rather than about every comment posted.

• Integrate with everything, via Zapier. So can get e.g. notifications to Slack. 2 weeks?

• Done, Jan 2020: Icons that shows if one has a draft saved, for a certain post. And auto-show one's drafts, so one can just continue typing. 1 week?

• Trust levels: Make the Trusted, Regular and Core Member trust levels work. Make the Unwanted vote have effect (those who post [comments that the staff and core members consider Unwanted] won't become Trusted members). 3 weeks?

• Add NSFW image filter, use Google's Vision API? Integrate with Perspective API to detect toxic comments? 1 week?

• LDAP, SAML, Okta etc login: 1 or 2 months? (need to replace the auth system, and can be tricky to setup automatic tests)

• Optionally upvote topics directly in topic list, for those who want Reddit and HackerNews like communities. 2 weeks?

• Optionally show reply text input box directly — that's more inviting, than having to click Reply first. 1 week?