13.0.0 - Paying off tech-debt - Release plan

Release plan

Over the years a lot of features have been added to Open Social making it a very full featured distribution. This major release will focus on the product decisions we've made so far and use everything we've learned to streamline the implementation and pay off some technical debt. This brings these features back into a position to serve us for the next 8 years.

Below you can find a detailed outline with issues we are planning for the 13.0.0 release. This list is subject to change as work progresses.

Release dates

13.0.0-alpha1 - 23-04-2024
13.0.0-alpha2 - 21-05-2024
13.0.0-beta - TBD
13.0.0-rc - TBD

Remaining tasks

• #3380714: [13.0.0] Remove support for public_group, open_group, closed_group, and secret_group and migrate to flexible_group - We've introduced Flexible Group a while ago which can do everything our old group types do. Flexible groups provide better focus of the "Group" concept within Open Social and frees up the group module to be used for other exciting use-cases.
• #3403634: Upgrade group module to version 2 - Group has a new major version with improvements to how permissions work, developer experience, and performance. In this major version we'll be upgrading to Group 2 and requiring it for all sites.
• #3348399: Move search to SOLR and drop support for searching against the database - Sites built on top of Open Social are non-trivial and users expect a modern search experience which requires usage of a dedicated search back-end. As of this major version we'll require the use of SOLR which enables us to bring search improvements to the distribution that we're currently only able to offer in our SaaS product.
• #3427280: Move Socialbase & Socialblue back in the Distribution
• Secret file system - https://www.drupal.org/node/3443080
• #3458767: Replace node grants with entity query access