Updates from the development team: June 20th, 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.

Mobile applications for iOS and Android

We had our first mobile development meeting last week to kick off the new team. We're still looking for developers with experience in React Native or Flutter to join the team. If you'd like to help, please sign up to contribute and help us build the mobile app!

This process will take some time, but you can expect to hear more about these apps later this year.

Community features

We've started releasing features within our local communities theme and will continue to do so in the next couple of releases. The next big community feature will be events, then guides and pages.

We've created a few initial communities and will work with local community leaders in the next few weeks to establishing more communities on the platform.

If you are interested in becoming a community leader, it's not too late to reach out to us by filling in the contributor form. If you are already heavily involved in a local travel community, please also reach out.

Invite feature and new signup flow

We will be redesigning the signup flow and creating an invite system to allow you to invite your friends and see how many people joined from your invitations.

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:

• Local Communities: the communities page was released [#535, #627, #658, #697, #737, #1319, #1333, #1361, #1443, #1445]
• Local Communities: discussions were released [#578, #578, #737, #986, #1114, #1180, #1197, #1251]
• Map: redesigned the map with user clustering, an updated layout, and new markers [#1332, #1404, #1408]
• References: added minimal formatting so text can include paragraphs [#1440]
• References: mandate that references must be non-empty [#1429]
• Profile: fixed the location selection instructive text [#1421]
• Infra: made some large refactoring changes to the API and backend codebase [#1373, #1385, #1386, #1397, #1418, #1434]

Stats

In the past two weeks, 10 developers collaborated on building Couchers.org through over 7 thousand lines of code changed that touched over 337 files. A warm welcome to our four new contributors who joined our development team and contributed to 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 2021/06/20.

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