We've made another release this week; Actually, we've made several since the last post:

• 2023 Week 17 (April)
• 2023 Week 23 (June)
• 2023 Week 32 (Latest Release - August)

Not a lot of exciting stuff in these releases - lots of bug-fixes and a few UX improvements.

• We did replace the fonts for users on non-Windows, non-Mac setups. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
• Generally improved UX, especially on Mobile
• Many, many fixes to Deprecated calls in PHP 8.1/8.2

On PHP 8

PHP have (in 8.1 and 8.2) deprecated a bunch of features we were/are using in Phorge. These features don't break yet - they're planned for removal in PHP 9.0.
However, in Phorge we (used to) automatically promote any deprecation warning to a fatal exception, so we could quickly find and handle them. That worked fine before, because previous deprecations weren't as impactful.
This time, the deprecations impact literally thousands of call-sites in Phorge (strlen($maybe_null) was a very common idiom).
Rather then suppressing all of these calls by mechanically replacing them with our own, backwards-compatible methods, we prefer to inspect each one and try to figure out "the right thing" (improve type infomration), but that takes time.

Starting now, deprecation warnings will no longer fatal the application. Instead, they will show up in the logs and as Setup Issues: administrators will have a warning lamp, showing traces for common issues and asking for bug reports.
This should allow us to (a) officially support PHP 8.x, and (b) fix deprecations at whatever pace we want, with some input about priority.

Community stuff

• The Wikimedia Foundation have completed their migration from Phabricator to Phorge last week - we're excited about their work, and looking forward for as much co-operation as possible.
• The WMF also had a Phorge section in two of their hackathons - in Athens and in Singapore (Coordinated by double-agent @valerio.bozzolan). Well done!

• We have our first few Community Projects hosted in Phactory, our Community-project hosts:
  • 2 Phorge extensions - for drawing diagrams and for managing semi-structured objects.
  • a collection of Rust tools for Phorge, and
  • a Visual Studio Code extension for Arcanist

We hope this is a sign of more growth in the future.