Hey folks, just wanted to speak to some upcoming features going live on DEV soon via Forem.

This is just a quick overview of some notable work that will be shipping soon. We’ll share more details as individual features go live throughout the next few months.

Multiple reactions: 🦄 The unicorn is back, and they brought friends!

A little while back, we removed the unicorn reaction in order to simplify the UI. However, we intended to re-introduce this reaction in the form of a “reaction drawer” which will allow for more reactions. Soon you will be able to select from five reactions, and we hope to continue evolving this over time.

We hope this update helps keep activity in the community light-hearted, fun and expressive. We will roll these out next week. 🔥

Billboards as a multi-purpose UI element

If you scroll to the bottom of this post, you’ll see a “billboard”, which is a box on the site that allows for flexible content. We will be rolling these out across the site in different places allowing our team to curate more interesting flows through the site.

These are just “boxes”, but they offer a lot of flexibility as to where they are located and what they can display. In these billboards, you’ll find everything from content suggestions, to promotions for upcoming events and hackathons, to guidance on how to take advantage of features of the platform you may have missed.

As we continue investing into Billboards, we will also be removing some separate functionality. One such removal is Listings which has been an area we have not been able to invest in. We want to do fewer things well, and we’ve committed to investing into billboards as our chosen utility for serving a lot of “peripheral” functionality across the site.

We’ll also be allowing platform sponsors to begin using Billboards to promote their message across the platform. Understandably, some folks might prefer to turn off billboards related to sponsorships, and you’re welcome to do so directly in your settings. We think that most people will enjoy seeing the latest of what we’re doing on the site, because we’ll be doing interesting things with sponsors, but it just seems right to offer this setting to both readers of content and writers of articles.

Pro Organization Tooling

Finally, we will be rolling out a dedicated tooling suite to help professionals on our site better understand their followers and create better content. Think “Hootsuite for DEV” with some dedicated functionality to help organizations connect with the community. We suspect this will be very useful for developer relations organizations, open source projects, and lots of use cases in-between.

If you're interested in learning more, please get in touch.

There will be more details to come on all of these things as we roll them out!

Happy coding ❤️