Building UNA 15 - a faster, more secure and reliable community platform.

The next major release, UNA 15 Vega is in active development and the first preview is available now. Unlike past versions that introduced large new features, UNA 15 is about consolidation and refinement. Highlights for this release include:

• Significant improvements in performance.
• Push towards better security.
• Overhauled DevOps workflows and policies.
• Streamlined User Experience.
• Improved API tooling for upcoming React/ReactNative SDK.
• Extended Payments functionality.
• Logging, observability and public demos.
• Reduced AI Agents (Automators) calls to the AI engine.

Performance

With new content caching, additional DB cache, reduced SQL queries and refactored sessions most UNA pages show significant improvements in load time! Further gains anticipated as we populate new patterns to all modules and test more.

Timing 4 simultaneous threads of 50 concurrent requests to each page on a sample site (online.me, running on a basic monolith cloud instance). Note the nearly 3x improvement in page load compared to UNA 14.

The total number of MySQL queries for key pages - also showing 1.5x to 3x reduction across the board:

We've identified further potential gains on complex pages like active profile feeds and contexts browsing. Working on those now, so expect those "chunky" routes to get a lot lighter.

Note that our tests are done deliberately with pages that include multiple blocks and activity data, with loads exceeding "recommended" capacity of the test instances. For more optimised deployments it is quite possible have consistent sub-1s FCP/LCP and 0 blocking time.

Security, Dependencies and DevOps

Now every commit we make to UNA core runs though a number of automated tests, AI-powered code reviews and scans.

• CodeRabbit code review, Snyk Scans and SonarCube checks. We scan commits and pull requests before merging and monitor the codebase daily for new vulnerabilities.
• DependaBot scans and monitoring. We scan dependencies for available updates and integrate
• API endpoints security — reviewed and secured all available endpoints.
• Added dedicated Healthcheck page and new logging levels.

Accessibility, Payments and UX enhancements

• Keyboard control and aria labels for WCAG 2.2 AA compliance
• Full rebuild of Stripe Connect integration (for Marketplace and Paid Groups)
• Improvements in Spaces, Groups and Courses
• Revised flow for Friend Requests, Following and Join context actions.

IMPORTANT:

• UNA 15 Alpha 1 Core is available for download via UNA GitHub Repo and via UNA Studio auto-updates (beta-channel).
• The Alpha 1 is an early development preview, not recommended for production. Use with caution.
• Please post your feedback, suggestions and ideas to Discussions.