Forem Project Weekly: Scheduled Automations, Image Generation & UX Upgrades

Forem Project News — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:08:27 +0000

Hello Forem Creators! It's been a very productive week for the Forem repository, with 30 pull requests merged. This cycle brought major new features, significant improvements to the admin experience, and a host of performance boosts and bug fixes. Let's dive in!

✨ New Features

This week saw the introduction of two powerful new features designed to enhance content creation and community management.

Scheduled Automations
A new system for "Scheduled Automations" has been added, allowing for time-based actions within a Forem. This foundational work opens the door for future features like scheduled post publishing, automated moderation tasks, and more. A few follow-up PRs were also merged to fix typing and data conversion issues.

Add scheduled automations #22556

benhalpern posted on Nov 07, 2025

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[ ] Refactor
[x] Feature
[ ] Bug Fix
[ ] Optimization
[ ] Documentation Update

Description

This integrates with community bots to be able to create things like automated github repo roundups and other forms of roundups, useful for subforems etc.

View on GitHub

Backend Image Generation
To support richer social sharing and content presentation, we've added a new backend functionality for programmatic image generation. This can be used to create dynamic open-graph images, social media cards, and other visual assets on the fly.

Add backend image generation functionality #22566

benhalpern posted on Nov 10, 2025

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[ ] Refactor
[x] Feature
[ ] Bug Fix
[ ] Optimization
[ ] Documentation Update

Description

Adds service for image generation — no UI, controllers or anything like that yet.

View on GitHub

🚀 Enhancements & Performance

Alongside new features, a significant effort was made to refine existing functionality and improve the platform's performance and architecture.

Admin Management (/manage) Overhaul
The /manage section received a lot of attention this week, with numerous pull requests dedicated to improving the user experience. This work included cleaning up styles, fixing sidebar overlap issues, improving edit functionality, and generally making the interface more intuitive for administrators.

Adjust /manage UX #22536

benhalpern posted on Nov 05, 2025

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[ ] Refactor
[ ] Feature
[x] Bug Fix
[ ] Optimization
[ ] Documentation Update

Description

Clarify language and fix edit form for /manage

View on GitHub

Performance Improvements
To make the user feed faster and more responsive, individual articles within the feed are now cached. Additionally, a new database index was added to speed up queries related to users and their associated GitHub repositories.

Cache feed individual articles #22533

benhalpern posted on Nov 04, 2025

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[ ] Refactor
[ ] Feature
[ ] Bug Fix
[x] Optimization
[ ] Documentation Update

Description

Individual articles are shared across many feed request contexts, and even though we do need to initially query for the articles, once we know which ones we're going to use we can rely on a lot of cached data.

View on GitHub

Shift to "Score" for Content Ranking
In a key architectural change, the platform is moving away from using a simple public_reactions_count for ranking content. A more nuanced score attribute will now be used, allowing for more sophisticated ranking algorithms in the future. A related change was also made to adjust the comment scoring calculation.

Change from public_reactions_count to score #22531

benhalpern posted on Nov 03, 2025

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[ ] Refactor
[x] Feature
[ ] Bug Fix
[x] Optimization
[ ] Documentation Update

Description

score is more appropriate for rankings because it reduces gaming — and we have more composite rankings built around this column.

View on GitHub

🐞 Fixes & Refinements

A wide array of bugs and smaller issues were addressed this week, including:

A potential race condition on the home page has been resolved.
The long-standing issue with updating status posts has been fixed "once and for all."
UI adjustments were made to the reading list's default state and the tag count display.
Fixed a bug where user URLs did not work correctly on sub-forems.
Corrected scoping issues with the reading list feature.
The image upload process for navigation links was simplified.

Additionally, a number of smaller commits addressed test cleanups, migration fixes, and tweaks to local development scripts.

That's all for this week. A big thank you to our contributors for their continued efforts to improve the Forem platform

Forem Weekly Repo Recap: New Community Hub, Email Fixes & Markdown Improvements

Forem Project News — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:36:33 +0000

Hello Forem contributors and community members! This week saw a flurry of activity focused on introducing and refining a brand new feature: the Community Hub. We also merged several key fixes to improve content creation and notifications.

✨ New Feature: The Community Hub

The highlight of the week is the introduction of the new Community Hub page! This new feature provides a central place for community interaction and discovery. The initial implementation was quickly followed by a series of rapid tweaks to refine the user experience and interface.

Add community hub page #22519

benhalpern posted on Oct 29, 2025

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[ ] Refactor
[x] Feature
[ ] Bug Fix
[ ] Optimization
[ ] Documentation Update

Description

Experimental new page which aggregates a bunch of community stuff into one page to see what's going on. Could be configurable etc.

View on GitHub

🛠️ Key Fixes & Enhancements

Beyond new features, we also focused on improving existing functionality for a better user experience:

Email & Authorship Fixes: A crucial fix was merged to correct issues with broken links in emails and ensure proper post authorship is always displayed. This resolves a significant pain point for both authors and readers.

Fix email links and authorship issues #22524

benhalpern posted on Oct 31, 2025

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[ ] Refactor
[x] Feature
[x] Bug Fix
[ ] Optimization
[ ] Documentation Update

Description

Currently emails lack subforem awareness — this generally adjust emails to be contextually aware of the subforem the user came in on.

View on GitHub

Improved Markdown Linking: Creating content just got a little easier. The markdown parser now correctly handles non-HTTP links (like mailto:), preventing them from breaking when rendered.

Handle non http links in markdown #22516

benhalpern posted on Oct 28, 2025

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[ ] Refactor
[x] Feature
[ ] Bug Fix
[ ] Optimization
[ ] Documentation Update

Description

This gives markdown more flexibility in handling links such as mailto

View on GitHub

🧹 Housekeeping & Other Updates

This week also included important maintenance work, such as a fix for a flaky test in the admin action panel specs and the removal of an unnecessary check in the tagged articles controller to streamline our codebase.

A big thank you to everyone who contributed this week! We're excited to see these changes live in Forem communities everywhere.

Forem: Forem Project News

Forem Project Weekly: Scheduled Automations, Image Generation & UX Upgrades

✨ New Features

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

Description

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

Description

🚀 Enhancements & Performance

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

Description

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

Description

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

Description

🐞 Fixes & Refinements

Forem Weekly Repo Recap: New Community Hub, Email Fixes & Markdown Improvements

✨ New Feature: The Community Hub

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

Description

🛠️ Key Fixes & Enhancements

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

Description

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

Description

🧹 Housekeeping & Other Updates