Hey folks, just wanted to speak to some upcoming features going live on DEV soon via Forem.
This is just a quick overview of some notable work that will be shipping soon. We’ll share more details as individual features go live throughout the next few months.
Multiple reactions: 🦄 The unicorn is back, and they brought friends!
A little while back, we removed the unicorn reaction in order to simplify the UI. However, we intended to re-introduce this reaction in the form of a “reaction drawer” which will allow for more reactions. Soon you will be able to select from five reactions, and we hope to continue evolving this over time.
We hope this update helps keep activity in the community light-hearted, fun and expressive. We will roll these out next week. 🔥
Billboards as a multi-purpose UI element
If you scroll to the bottom of this post, you’ll see a “billboard”, which is a box on the site that allows for flexible content. We will be rolling these out across the site in different places allowing our team to curate more interesting flows through the site.
These are just “boxes”, but they offer a lot of flexibility as to where they are located and what they can display. In these billboards, you’ll find everything from content suggestions, to promotions for upcoming events and hackathons, to guidance on how to take advantage of features of the platform you may have missed.
As we continue investing into Billboards, we will also be removing some separate functionality. One such removal is Listings which has been an area we have not been able to invest in. We want to do fewer things well, and we’ve committed to investing into billboards as our chosen utility for serving a lot of “peripheral” functionality across the site.
We’ll also be allowing platform sponsors to begin using Billboards to promote their message across the platform. Understandably, some folks might prefer to turn off billboards related to sponsorships, and you’re welcome to do so directly in your settings. We think that most people will enjoy seeing the latest of what we’re doing on the site, because we’ll be doing interesting things with sponsors, but it just seems right to offer this setting to both readers of content and writers of articles.
Pro Organization Tooling
Finally, we will be rolling out a dedicated tooling suite to help professionals on our site better understand their followers and create better content. Think “Hootsuite for DEV” with some dedicated functionality to help organizations connect with the community. We suspect this will be very useful for developer relations organizations, open source projects, and lots of use cases in-between.
If you're interested in learning more, please get in touch.
There will be more details to come on all of these things as we roll them out!
Happy coding ❤️
Oldest comments (25)
🦄
🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄
Exciting!!! Ben, you probably have gotten this question a lot but I'm curious if you've thought about implementing ActivityPub on Dev?
I think we'd gotten a little too spread thin to truly consider it in a way we could do it right in the past, but I think we're getting more organized such that we could. Of course, the principles behind it are deeply aligned with our purpose for existence, but anything we do, we want to make sure it puts community safety first.
What is ActivityPub ?
That’s awesome! Can’t wait!
🥳🦄
That’s awesome! Can’t wait! tooo
Since you are finally bringing the unicorn back, I think you should give it a name.
Any plan to turn
manifest.jsonback on so we can install as a PWA again? Also, previewing comments before posting them currently appears to be broken/flaky🥳
Can't wait for it!!
amazing! can’t wait
Yayyy thanks team! Love watching this platform evolve
And honestly really excited for the unicorn to be back 🦄
Let's go! 🦄
So exciting!!!
Thank you for the work, looking forward to these updates and especially the Return Of The Unicorn!
I've got a few questions, though. Badges so far have yielded credits for listings - is this something you plan to continue with billboards? Also, the name "pro tools" indicates cost. Can you tell us something about the pricing already?
Good question!
We intend to wind down the rewarding of new credits in the current way it's done, but will track credits that people had historically and allow these to be used towards the new system in some manner yet to be determined.
This is a big reason why we are taking our time with this migration. No firm prices on Pro Tools yet, but it will be something we offer at different tiers based on the needs. Small orgs and non-commercial orgs will get access at different rates vs enterprise. Still working out the details to make sure we can do this all fairly.
I can't get into more details, but just want to affirm that this is all being considered thoughtfully.
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