Corey Chapman, YaBB Project Leader & Owner of XIMinc, has recently announced the... YaBB 3 and Development Road Map.  This is the latest details on the coming YaBB 3 currently in development.  Here is the reprint of Corey's announcement:

May 13th, 2009 at 7:05am

The YaBB Development team has decided to go a different route to develop the next line of YaBB, which will be called YaBB 3.  Off and on over the past few years, code has been written from scratch in order to reinvent YaBB's functionality and improve performance in the best manner possible.  The coding style (which was using object-oriented Perl) and the thought of starting from scratch has limited the amount of developers willing to work on this code.

Although we have a functioning system with this new code, it was determined that reinventing every feature would be too time-consuming.  We have now decided to continue with the existing code, the same as we did with YaBB 1 to create YaBB 2.  However, we will have the same direction/goals we always did with YaBB 3.  Hopefully this new route will bring us a YaBB 3 sooner.

The primary goals of the initial YaBB 3 release will be:

- To have code that is easy to read and understand
- Reduced code that maximizes re-usability (for reduced file size and memory load)
- A documentation system that documents the code, the data structures, and how all functions work
- Better data integrity that prevents server overloads or data loss when the account or server runs out of disk space or memory
- Improved page loading times and reduced server CPU and memory usage
- An easy plug-in modding system that doesn't require rewriting code
- An improved templating engine that is easy to understand, yet allows for customizing nearly every page
- A database system that allows for ANY data system to be used (such as current flat file, MySQL, MSsql, PostGresl, MS Access, Oracle, Excel) - starting with flat file and MySQL
- Support for FastCGI with strict and warnings turned on
- Some exciting new features (hand-picked from a long list of features already identified to eventually be included in YaBB 3 releases)

The road map for YaBB development will be as follows:
1)  From this point forward, we will be more strict on our rule to implement no new features to the YaBB 2 line.  Tweaks to existing functionality are allowed as long as it is not a major change.

2)  YaBB 2.4.1 will be the next release of YaBB 2, with only bug and security fixes.  This will be the last planned release of the YaBB 2, unless any major bugs are found.  In order to prevent this, we will have beta testing.  It's release will be around October of 2009.

3)  A new development site will be opened to the public by summer of 2009 with all active development activity taking place there.  Hopefully with all development activity taking place publicly, we can attract more developers, more ideas, and more code testers.

4)  In the meantime (starting now), YaBB 3 development will commence in a separate/new development branch, starting with YaBB 2.4 Forum Software code.  No work being developed for the first YaBB 3 release will be released in any YaBB 2 maintenance release's code.  YaBB 3 will be prepared for beta mode by January 1, 2010 with a first release shortly after.

5)  Future YaBB 3 releases will be a minimum of every 3 but no longer than 6 months apart, depending on the severity of changes made.

6)  We will move development code from CVS to SVN (subversion) on SourceForge's system, which is an improved system.