[WIP] Open Social - 11.0.0

Problem/Motivation

At Open Social we are currently working on our new Major milestone: 11.0.0

In this issue we would like to outline the status of the upcoming changes that we are planning for this release and what it means to you.

Remaining tasks

#3207776: Open Social using Drupal 9

First of all we want Open Social to ship with Drupal 9.
Not just Open Social's custom code, but also all the contributed modules.

This also means you will need to update your own added custom & contrib modules to make them Drupal 9 ready if you wish to use all the improvements it has to offer.

In the linked ticket you will find all information and work in progress on that part.

We will also ship Open Social with PHP 7.4 by default.

#3217353: Zero permission user role

We have noticed shipping a Distribution with all the permissions set to authenticated users by default brings quite some hurdles.

• Spam prevention: New accounts can create content and thus spam your community.
• Monitization: Registered users can actively engage with the entiry community. Making it difficult to create a layer of Monitization in between.
• Information density: New users, without an up to date profile, are shown in overviews. With their default profile, no information it means it's harder to connect to your active members

For this we came up with a new set-up. We have redesigned the permissions for authenticated users, and we have added a new verified user role. This means a site manager can now decide if users signing up to the platform get all the permissions on sign-up, or if they get a limited set of permissions. Giving them these limited permissions, allows you to create your own roles & permissions to allow users to get an enhanced experience if they earned it. Wether that is by trust, payment or something else we leave that up to you to decide.

#3215750: Open Social 11 Deprecation Tracker

This is where we will keep track of all the Open Social related deprecated functions that will be removed from 11.0.0.

... More to come!

Recommend version
We will stop recommending the 10.x versions when Drupal 8 is EOL.
Our 10.x versions will have Drupal 8 and therefore stop getting support for Core and we will follow that path so please start thinking about upgrading as soon as possible.

Milestone & issue on Github
If you are looking for all tickets that are in progress for this milestone? You can take a look here:
https://github.com/goalgorilla/open_social/milestone/103

Planning / Revised
11.0.0 is planned for the first week of October, we are likely to release some beta versions before that to get early feedback.
11.0.0-alpha1 - by the 21st of October (or sooner if module updates are completed)
11.0.0-beta1 - 12th of November
11.0.0 - X November depending on feedback.

Stop supporting all 10.x versions on Drupal 8 EOL.