We’re planning to introduce a new versioning system for Discourse. Our goal is to provide more choice & predictability for community administrators, while maintaining our development velocity. We’re also adjusting some terminology to align better with other software. This document will evolve as we…

It’s not about when the theme/plugin author pushes a fix, it’s about when Discourse core has a security fix. Per [image] david: Approximately every 6 months, declare one of those releases as an Extended Support Release (ESR). ESR versions remain supported for 2 releases after the next ESR is d…

[image] schneeland: What’s not quite clear to me yet is how the upgrade process will work for the release and esr branches (latest seems straight-forward). With the current launcher tooling, and this new branch structure, you could have control over upgrade timing by doing something like: v…

[image] schneeland: My understanding based on the previous posts was that the creation of a release version branch would automatically trigger the creation of a plugin branch for that version It’s up to the plugin/theme author here. Either they can continue with the current strategy, where th…

[image] RGJ: It’s not about when the theme/plugin author pushes a fix, it’s about when Discourse core has a security fix. Ok, but I think then I understand the problem even less :confused: Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter as per @david ‘s latest comments, so just to wrap it up. The propo…

[image] david: With the current launcher tooling, and this new branch structure, you could have control over upgrade timing by doing something like: … But manually editing that app.yml every month is really not ideal, so hopefully we’ll be able to design a system which makes the process more u…

SemVer itself isn’t really designed for large applications. I understand it to be much more targeted at libraries consumed by software, and in particular, the version numbering logic is built around the package’s API. We could apply semver to our API(s), though. Having stronger guarantees around th…

[image] mcwumbly: I think the “leading zeroes” suggestion is the only thing that we would be breaking from if we go that route. The OP says that you’re not using leading zeros, if I understand correctly. [image] david: e.g. the first release of 2026 would be v2026.0, next would be v2026.…

The point of SemVer is that the version number should communicate some useful information. The only information communicated by your proposed scheme is the earth’s orbit around the sun. That information is not very useful to the consumer of the software. If for some reason I did want to know the da…

[image] pfaffman: The OP says that you’re not using leading zeros, if I understand correctly. I proposed that a few posts up. [image] per1234: version number having meaning instead of just being some arbitrary number, as is the case with your proposal. Contrary to semver, the proposed…

RFC: A new versioning strategy for Discourse

Development

per1234 September 26, 2025, 4:06pm 24

I don’t see any benefit to this year-based versioning scheme you propose. Stick with the SemVer compliant version numbers!

Topic		Replies	Views
January 2026 Releases Announcements release-notes	15	1251	February 3, 2026
Stable branch compatibility with discourse_docker and plugins Self-hosting stable	37	2708	February 3, 2024
Enable updates only to a given release UX	28	3278	January 25, 2017
Is Discourse always in "beta"? Support	22	5963	May 9, 2023
Introducing releases.discourse.org Announcements	9	817	January 10, 2026

RFC: A new versioning strategy for Discourse

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