We're not standing still! Citadel is an active project with big plans and big improvements going on behind the scenes. But it isn't always apparent, from just looking at the current releases, what we're up to. So here's a peek at some highlights from our development roadmap.
The vast majority of our development effort is going towards a complete overhaul of our WebCit user interface. This is a fully REST/DAV implementation with a modern single-page user interface. Here is an example of the "forum" app:
And here's the "mail" app:
We think you'll be very pleased!
Site operators have been asking for us to support storage back ends other than just Berkeley DB. In some cases this was because of a desire to distance the open source community from Oracle after they acquired Sleepycat Software and changed the license. In other cases, some sites were experiencing difficulty with the current implementation.
Citadel began with flat files in 1981, then changed to GDBM in 1998 and added Berkeley DB in 2002. During the summer of 2023 we made some big improvements to our storage layer, to allow us to add swappable storage back ends. In the process, we ended up doing some bug fixes that made the Berkeley DB driver more stable than ever! In fact, we were unable to break it even when we tried; and there have been ZERO reports of database corruption since version 993 was released in September 2023.
Going forward, we have plans to eventually add support for LMDB as a Citadel data store. This will only be practical on 64-bit systems, so the Berkeley DB store will remain available for 32-bit systems, and for sites which have an existing database and do not wish to convert.
After WebCit-NG goes live, we will be integrating Citadel into the "Fediverse". Specifically, we will implement protocols such as ActivityPub and/or whatever is in general use. When this is complete, Citadel sites will become compatible with Mastodon and all other Fediverse software.