Rivet announcements: Beta timeline, GitHub Discussions, and 1.8.0 release

First, I want to extend a big thank you to the IU community for your patience. Over the past year, many teams – including ours – had to shift their priorities to respond to the needs of students, faculty, and staff as they managed learning, teaching, and working amid a global pandemic.

We recognize that many units rely on Rivet as a central piece of their digital properties, and while the next major version is still in the planning stages, it’s important that we continue in the meantime to support the many people at IU using the design system.

To that end, I’d like to share a few updates related to Rivet’s development through the end of the academic year.

Beta timeline #

Digital Campus has begun the process of transitioning back to normal operations and shifting away from immediate-need projects related to IU’s coronavirus response. With more time and resources committed to Rivet once again, development has resumed on the next major version.

Our goal is to make a public beta available this summer. Some details on what this release will include remain to be determined, but as work on the university-wide design language progresses over the coming months, we’ll share more about what features Rivet 2 will include.

GitHub Discussions #

We’ve adopted GitHub Discussions in an effort to better handle feature requests and general questions from the community.

Unlike regular GitHub issues, which are intended for bug tracking, GitHub Discussions are laid out in way that should be familiar to anyone who has used an online discussion board or question-and-answer site.

The goal of GitHub Discussions is to provide a more accessible, transparent forum in which people using Rivet can suggest new features or get help with questions they might have.

For more about submitting ideas for new features, enhancement requests, and questions, see the recently updated Rivet wiki.

1.8.0 release #

We plan on releasing Rivet version 1.8.0 at the end of February. Our goal is to restart work on the backlog of open issues and return to a consistent monthly release schedule.

Going forward, Rivet 1 releases will only contain bug fixes and critical updates related to accessibility or security. Work on new features is being rolled into the overall development of Rivet 2.

We’ll share more updates to the Rivet 1 end-of-life and migration plan in the near future as more details become finalized.