Howdy everyone – I hope everyone has been keeping safe during these trying times. I just wanted to give you all a kind of rough roadmap for what the next few months hold for us, the features we’re hoping to get into v6 of Snipe-IT, and what that timeline looks like.
Please make sure you’re upgraded to PHP 7.4 or higher before Snipe-IT v6 launches.
Timeline
We’re hoping to have v6 out by the end of September. We’re hoping to have this coincide with the release of Laravel 9 LTS, but if for some reason that isn’t feasible, Since LTS Laravel v9 won’t come out until January, we’ll be launching v6 with Laravel v8.4.x and then will drag it forward to Laravel 9 as soon as we can afterwards.
We already have an integration branch in progress on develop-v6-integration that’s running on Laravel 8.4 and is PHP 8 compatible.
We are NOT currently planning on doing much development work on the existing Snipe-IT v5 codebase. New PRs against develop will likely not be taken, so please don’t submit them. If you have a feature or fix you’re interested in working on, you should consider doing them on the integration branch. A LOT will have changed between Snipe-IT v5 and Snipe-IT v6, and it’s already going to be merge hell. If a feature is that important, please make it against a fork of develop and also from a fork of the integration branch. We know it’s double the work, but the less awful this merge stuff is, the smoother and faster the v6 rollout will be.
We will, as always, start to roll out alpha, beta and release candidates as it’s ready. You can view a live demo of the v6 branch here: https://develop.snipe-it.io/login (login: admin / password )
That gets continuously deployed as we push to that integration branch, so it’s a good way to get an idea of where we’re at at any given point in time.
Code Notes
- No more Vue. I’ve honestly always disliked it for us, largely because of localization issues and build cycles. I’ll be ripping it out wherever it appears and replacing it with…
- Livewire! Livewire is super duper rad and lightning fast and we’ll be slowly swapping out some of our clunkier javascript and Vue with Livewire.
- JS cleanup (tree-shaking, etc)
Now then, let’s get to the good stuff… Here’s what we’re hoping to add/improve in the v6 line of Snipe-IT:
Feature Highlights
- QTY as an option for checkout on consumables, etc
- Feature to auto-assign licenses for every user
- “Unlimited seats” for licenses
- G Suite Secure LDAP (client-side certs?)
- Custom fields for more models (people, licences, etc)
- Improved UX/UI for checkouts from users page
- Finer tuning on asset acceptance flow (kiosk mode, storing EULA in the database, etc)
- Better debugging for SAML
- Re-re-writing the LDAP system to remove AdLdap and improve configuration screens
- Improving the advanced search in table listings
Here’s the roadmap as we currently have it. We’re still drilling down the dates of things, and these things can be tricksy in open source, since we kinda never know what outside contirbutors are working on, but also bear in mind that these are just the epics, not the actual stories, so you can see there’s a ton of work ahead of us. Some of these have already been in progress for a few weeks, some haven’t been started yet. Many of these have been weeks or months in planning.
If you’re interested in working on any of these features, please reach out via GH and discuss with us. We’ve got the architecture for most of these things pretty solidly mapped out, so we can probably help move things along and make sure you’re set up for PR success.
And as always, remember – just because YOUR feature might not make it into v6, it’s not like we’re stopping development when v6 launches. We keep chugging along, and we’ll keep adding new features and fixes as we always have. The only real reason we’re even calling it v6 is because there is a PHP version dependency change, an in the spirit of semver, we try to do a major version bump when that happens.
Be sure to subscribe to our blog at https://grokstar.dev, and check out our newest product, GoodForms, which offers unlimited email verification (not just validation) and certification for just $10 a month. Also be sure to check out these videos/podcasts if you need to blow some time 🙂
Until next time!
