A new chapter

Exactly one year after the first beta release (and almost 3 years of development, many pre-releases, countless bug fixes, new features, and a bit of polish), the farmOS community is proud to announce the official release of farmOS 2.0.0!

This is a symbolic release, signifying that farmOS v2 is no longer in "beta". If you've been following the development process, you'll know that this isn't a big change. farmOS v2 has been "stable" for a while, and many are already building their record-keeping workflows on top of it. While the version change seems small, it is the culmination of years of hard work, discussions, decisions, and commits (7548 to be exact).

Moving forward, smaller and more frequent releases are expected, using semantic versioning to indicate bug fixes, new features, and breaking changes. Releases will be announced via the farmOS microblog, which broadcasts to both @farmOS@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, and @farmOSorg on Twitter. We will also use the microblog for other community news and announcements, so be sure to follow along!

Notable changes

In March 2022, on the heels of 2.0.0-beta1, we presented an in-depth overview of farmOS v2's new features, changes, and improvements as part of the OpenTEAM In-Depth Learning Series. The recording is embedded below, followed by an overview of notable changes since farmOS v1.

• Data model
  • Documented data model
  • Areas are now types of Assets
  • New Asset types: Land, Structure, Water, Material, Seed
  • Planting Assets are renamed to Plant
  • New Log types: Lab test (merged Soil and Water tests)
  • Inventory tracking for all Asset types
  • Improved Asset location logic, including the ability to designate Assets as "fixed" (with intrinsic geometry) and/or "locations" (allowing other Assets to be moved to them)
  • Improved Group membership logic, including member inheritence of group location
  • Support for Quantity types
  • Revisions for tracking changes to records
  • Improved "Data streams" framework for sensors and other time-series data collection
  • ID tags on all Asset types
  • Flags can be limited by record type
• User interface/experience (UI/UX)
  • Improved location hierarchy drag-and-drop editor, including ability to edit sub-hierarchies
  • Improved KML/KMZ importer for bulk Land Asset creation
  • Geocoding of GeoJSON and GPX files (in addition to KML/KMZ) on individual Assets and Logs
  • Farm settings UI with simplified module installer
  • Gin admin theme
  • Improved mobile support
• APIs, libraries, and developer experience (DX)
  • Documented API changes
  • Modernized RESTful API built on JSON:API
  • JSON Schema for all API resources
  • 2.x API support in farmOS.js and farmOS.py libraries
  • Updated farmOS-map library based on OpenLayers
  • Improved APIs for module builders
  • Object-oriented architecture based on Symfony
  • Dependency management via Composer
  • Automated testing via PHPUnit and GitHub Actions
  • Coding standards enforcement via CodeSniffer
  • Feature branch previews via Tugboat
• Hosting
  • PostgreSQL database support (alongside MySQL, MariaDB, and SQLite3)
  • Automated migration from 1.x to 2.x
  • Improved performance with lazy-loading code and caching options
  • Improved support for translation/localization (l10n)
• Security
  • Support from the Drupal Security Team
  • Drupal 9 will be supported (with security updates) until November 2023.
  • Drupal 10 was released December 15th, 2022. The farmOS update process will be trivial compared to the upgrade from Drupal 7, which required a complete refactor of the codebase. By comparison, updating from Drupal 9 to 10 will simply involve updating deprecated code.

Next steps

2023 is going to be a fun year for farmOS development. We have big plans and some exciting news to share soon! So stay tuned!

Some of our next priorities include new crop and grazing planning modules, more quick forms, new integrations with third-party services and models, development and documentation of standard record-keeping conventions, and much much more.

If you have ideas, we welcome you to join us in the farmOS community forum, monthly calls, and chat room. We've had so many great conversations and brainstorms in 2022, and I expect 2023 will bring even more!

Thanks

We couldn't have done all of this without the generous support and contributions of our community. farmOS v2 had more contributors than ever before, and our base of users, developers, and backers continues to grow.

Special thanks to Paul Weidner, Jamie Gaehring, Symbioquine, Pedro Cambra, Greg Austic, Dorn Cox, Wolfe's Neck Center, the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, Our Sci, Rothamsted Research, all of the regulars on our community calls (you know who you are!), and all of our OpenCollective backers.

If you would like to help support the continued development of farmOS and its community, please consider sponsoring our work: farmOS.org/donate

Thank you and Happy New Year! 🎉