After months of development and testing and your valuable feedback, we are very pleased to announce the release of new version of our forum, Codoforum V5.0
Our primary focus for this release has been the internal framework itself and a whole host of new features.

Here are some of the major changes:

Highlight to Quote:

Now you can easily quote while replying to topics by simply highlighting any part of the text and clicking the quote button.

Badges:

Now easily assign badges and make your members feel special.

You can also upload your own badges from the control panel

Sticky topic without permission

This is really useful when you want your categories to be private but would want the sticky topic to be visible to users who do not have permission to view the category. This can be toggled from the Global Settings in the Control Panel.

Login as any user

Note: This feature is for admin users to help debug any issues and hence you are responsible to uphold any privacy laws that are prevalent in your country. This can be accessed from Manage users -> Edit a user, and you should see a button to login as that user.

Replace Limonade with FastRoute Router

We have been using the Limonade framework for over 6 years now and the framework isn't being maintained and is not compatible with new version of PHP (PHP7.4 and above), Hence we switched to FastRoute, It is written by Nikita Popov, one of the current principal contributors to PHP, Apart from being fast, it is also used as a base for many other frameworks out there.

Global search feature

We have centralized both the topics and category search into one unified interface with advanced filters and sorting options.

Other Features:

Responsive videos for mobiles
Backend options for infinite and hide topic messages
Libraries moved to composer
Added vBulletin Importer
New plugin for Azure Active Directory support
Faster email batching and dequeue

We have made a couple of performance improvements as well as fixed many bugs.

List of changes:

Cyrillic characters fixed
Excerpt updated for better performance and view
Mentions not working properly fixed
Title split fixed
Permission fixes and aggregator fixes
Made save button responsive in all pages
Added non-ssl mail support
Fixed digest bugs
Infinite scrolling not working fixed
Fixed responsive theme issues
More prominent create/reply buttons
Password fix for PHP 7.4
Poll edit bug fixed
BBcode multiline not working fixed
Added missing translations when infinite scroll in topic
Delete post bug fixed
Many Editor UI fixes
Closed topic permission fix
Image preview fix
Template bug fixes

Preparing for PHP 8 and Codoforum 6

Codoforum so far has maintained strict backwards compatibility, this means you could upgrade from the oldest version of Codoforum to v5 without any major issues. The plugins written for v1 would still work for v5. This ofcourse comes at a price, The price being a lot of bloat to maintain backwards compatibility and a lot of time spent in regression tests. Codoforum v5 removes a lot of bloat and is almost a major rewrite, but as we are tied to PHP 7.3, we still cannot use the new PHP features like, Typed class properties, JIT, Attributes, Null safe operator, named arguments etc which make the code a lot cleaner, faster and easier to maintain.

Hence, we have decided that going forward, the next major release would target PHP 8, Yes, we know PHP 8 isn't out yet and is a few months away but we have already started making preparations for it.

What would this mean for you?
Likely nothing to worry about, you will be able to upgrade from V5.x to v6 from the control panel, If your plugins and themes target v5, they will mostly work as they do. If there are issues, we will help you through the upgrade process.