Quite a lot of events happened for the XWiki project in 2017. In order to keep everyone informed on how the project is evolving, here is a summary of the different events that kept us moving during the past 12 months, in chronological order.
New user forum
In May, we switched to a new user forum powered by the Discourse open source project. The idea behind that was to provide an easier solution for any XWiki user to connect with the community without having to subscribe to a mailing list. At the time of writing this article, forum.xwiki.org lists about 850 threads.
Though the mailing list users@xwiki.org is now in "read-only" mode, you can still view its archives either on Markmail or on Nabble.
Introduction of Flavors
Starting with XWiki 9.5.1, we switched from providing the old "XWiki Enterprise" package, with a default set of installed applications to the "Flavors" concept. In XWiki, a flavor is simply a bundle of extensions that serve a particular usage. As an equivalent to XWiki Enterprise, we now release the "XWiki Standard" flavor that provides the same functionalities as XWiki Enterprise while using this new concept.
For more informations, do not hesitate to check out Caty's blog post on this subject.
Participation to GSoC 2017
This summer, XWiki was part of the Google Summer of Code. Four projects were coordinated by Paul, Thomas and Vincent and cool new extensions were developed such as repository connectors or DokuWiki import tools. Get more informations about XWiki propositions for the GSoC on this page.
User Meetups
In September 2017, we started to organize user meetups on Google Hangouts, and broadcasted on Youtube Live. The main goal of those meetups is to talk about the different possible use cases of XWiki in the community and discuss about new features or known problems without getting too technical about it. User meetups are held once a month, usually on a Thursday evening, starting at 18:00 CEST, UTC+2. Every meetup is free for everyone to join, just make sure to manifest your participation on the related forum post 
.
While waiting for the next meetup, you can watch a replay of the previous ones on the XWiki Youtube channel!
Participation to GCI 2017
Finally, XWiki is now participating for the first time to the Google Code In challenge, grouping students between 13 and 17 years old to solve accessible tasks on the project or its extensions. This year's session started on Tuesday, November 28, 2017 and will run until Thursday, January 18, 2018.
Since the start of this contest, we received an important amount of contributions from multiple students! If you are one of those students, we hope that you will find it interesting to contribute to the XWiki project and maybe come back after the contest in order to work on other tasks 
!
What's next?
January 2018 should be the release month of the last version of the 9.X cycle and, though not specific roadmap is already defined for the next 12 months, we can assure you that we'll keep on working to improve XWiki general usability, as well as performances.
For this new year, if you are interested in helping the XWiki project, the easiest way to do so is by providing us your feedback, reporting an issue or just spreading the word! We also provide a complete contribution guide for other ways to help !
All in all, XWiki wouldn't be anything without its nearly 5000 active installations so thanks to you, XWiki user!
The whole XWiki Development Team wishes you a prosperous and happy new year!
