Release History

This is the record of what has actually been deployed. The announcement email says a change is coming; this page says what landed and when.

Newest first. Each entry gives the date the version reached the live museum, not the date the work was finished — those are often weeks apart, and only the first one matters to a family.

How to read a version number

A deploy and a version are not the same thing. Every merge to the main branch deploys, which means the museum changes more often than this list has entries. A version number is cut at a point worth naming: a set of work that hangs together, or a moment we want to be able to point back to.

So each entry below names the window it covers, not just its own day. Things that went live in the middle of a window were live from that moment, under the previous version’s number. The gaps between entries are small releases, not quiet weeks.

Where the numbers come from

The version is stamped into every deploy and reported at /api/health on both the live museum and the staging one. If you ever need to know which version a family is actually looking at, that is the honest answer, and it beats reading this page.

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1.8.0 — Friday 11 September 2026

Live from 10:00 Berlin on Friday 11 September 2026. No downtime at any point.

Covers 8 to 11 September. Three of these you will notice the first time you open a room; the fourth you will only notice because something that used to go wrong stopped.

1. Photographs arrive gracefully. Opening a photograph used to leave you looking at an empty frame while it loaded. A soft version of the picture now appears at once and sharpens into place, and the museum begins fetching the full picture the moment your pointer rests on it. Photographs are also asked for at the size they are actually shown rather than at full size and then shrunk, so a room with many pictures settles noticeably sooner.
2. The screening room’s controls work again. The play bar was sitting behind the panel that starts a film. It could not be paused, scrubbed or turned down, and it darkened whenever the pointer came near it — which is why most people concluded there was none. It now sits above that panel and takes the click. The controls still withdraw once a film is running, so the film is the only thing left on the wall; any movement of the mouse brings them straight back. Found by Piet and Maíra within a day of each other, on two different museums.
3. A museum reaches its curators straight away. Someone given access to a museum could not see it until they signed out and back in — their key was real the whole time, but the museum kept the older list of what they were allowed to open, and kept it for as long as they stayed signed in. That list is now re-read while they browse.
4. The museum honours “reduce motion” everywhere. If your device asks for less movement, the museum now listens in every room rather than in the rooms that remembered to ask.

Smaller: in a photograph’s reading panel the close button no longer sits on top of the story text, and the keyboard stays inside the panel until it is closed. In a collection of interviews, the heading over the full set now reads “Browse the collection”.

Nothing here touches a family's own material

Every change in this release is about how the museum behaves, not about what is in it. No photograph, film, story or family record was altered.

1.7.0 — Tuesday 8 September 2026

Live from 14:25 Berlin on Tuesday 8 September 2026, the same afternoon as 1.6.0. No downtime at any point. Nothing was announced beforehand, because nothing in it is visible to a family.

Covers the afternoon of 8 September: the second half of what 1.6.0 began. A family exists because CDiT registered it; now a family’s look comes from its record too.

1. A family’s look comes from its record. Colours and lettering are no longer a hand-written style sheet per family. They are a small set of settings on the family’s record, worked out the same way for every family and checked for legibility before they can be saved. The four museums that exist today render exactly as before; that was proven against the old style sheets before anything changed. One deliberate exception: the Sugahara cinema room now carries the dark stage behind the screen that the other rooms already had.
2. The last bundled list of families is gone. Until today the museum still carried a file naming every family. Nothing has read it since 1.6.0, and it is deleted. Adding a family is purely a record now, and a family that is not in the registry is unknown, not half-known.
3. A wrong look fails loudly. A family whose settings are missing or invalid no longer quietly renders in another family’s colours. The museum refuses to open it and says why, so it is caught before the family sees it.

What still takes a release

A typeface the museum does not yet carry. Everything else about a family’s look, and the family itself, is a record.

1.6.0 — Tuesday 8 September 2026

Live from 12:05 Berlin on Tuesday 8 September 2026, a day after the announced Monday 09:00 window. No downtime at any point.

Covers 24 August to 8 September, including the 1.5.1 hotfix that went live on 25 August (its notes live in the repository, as every small fix’s do). Like 1.5.0, most of this release is invisible on the live museum today: it is the Family Tree room reaching its finished form — and, underneath, the change that lets a new family join the live museum without waiting for a release.

1. A person is more than a name. The tree now carries the name someone was actually known by — Artie, Tante Fumi — and the name they were born with; search finds a person by any of them. Born and died each carry a place beside the date.
2. The lines say what the family says. An adopted, step or foster child is drawn as a child, on a dotted line, with the word shown beside the parent. Brothers and sisters stand oldest to youngest.
3. The room knows who you are. Signed in and part of the tree, the wall label answers the first question anyone asks in front of a family tree: how are we related — “Your great-aunt,” “Your former husband.” Said only to you, and only within reach of a name; beyond that the room stays quiet.
4. Generations carry the family’s own word. Issei, Nisei, Sansei — or whatever the family calls them — shown exactly as the curator wrote it, on the plate and the wall label.
5. The wall label reads as a ledger. Parents, partners and children in vertical lists, the current partner first, each person’s dates aligned on the right — the deceased carry theirs.
6. For curators: on a museum that is open to the family, edit links no longer appear at all — curators see precisely what the family sees.
7. A family can now be added to the live museum without a release. Until this version a museum could only be added to the live building as part of a software release, which is why a new family’s opening had to be planned around a release day. From now on we register a family in an afternoon; the live museum knows it within a minute, and every other family notices nothing. Foster and Quinney Lawson, still being curated in the sandbox, will be the first families to arrive this way — when a sandbox is finished and reviewed, on the usual circuit: curate, review, 48 hours’ notice. Nothing moves with this release but the platform itself. Opening is still done on purpose: a registered museum stays closed until the museum itself, its collections and its curators’ access are switched on together, by hand. See Going Live.
8. The museum no longer calls itself an archive. The line under the museum’s name at the door, the description shown when a link to the museum is shared, and the page shown for a link that no longer works all used the word; they now say museum. A museum is lived in; an archive is filed away.

Still deliberately not visible

As in 1.5.0: the Family Tree room renders only for a museum that declares one, which on the live museum is still none. It arrives for a family once their own tree content is in place, and is announced then.

Built, and deliberately not visible

A family’s look — its colours and lettering — is on its way from a hand-written style sheet to a small set of settings on the family’s record, worked out the same way for every family and checked for legibility before they can be saved. The four museums that exist today render exactly as before; that was proven before anything changed. It arrives with a later release and will be invisible when it does. The one thing that still takes a release is a typeface the museum does not yet carry.

1.5.0 — Monday 24 August 2026

Live from 10:43 Berlin on Monday 24 August 2026, later than the announced 09:00 window. No downtime at any point.

Covers 3 August to 24 August. The largest release since the museum went live, and most of it is invisible.

1. Story Collections opens on the full collection. Every story in one grid on arrival, rather than the smaller thumbnails of the curated wall. The curated wall is unchanged and one tap away.
2. Covers and running times fill themselves in from Vimeo wherever a curator left them empty. Anything set by hand always wins.
3. Films carry an automatically generated transcript, labelled as such, which stands down entirely where a curator has written the telling.
4. Captions come from the museum rather than from the player. A corrected caption is now the one a visitor sees; previously the player chose for itself and could show a superseded version.
5. For curators: a cover uploaded to a story is now used rather than quietly ignored, and a running time typed by hand now wins over the one Vimeo reports. A Vimeo Sync column appears on the Films and Stories tables, safe to leave blank.

Built, and deliberately not visible

The Family Tree room is substantially complete: it opens on you, it can be searched, people carry their own photographs and films, and the lines now say who is a current partner, who is a former one, and who was never a couple. It renders only for a museum that declares a Family Tree room, which today is none of them. It gets announced when it arrives, not when it ships.

1.4.0 — 3 August 2026

Covers 4 July to 3 August. The release that made the museum feel like a building rather than a website.

1. Rooms open as rooms. No more black screen: a proper loading plaque, the room ready before it appears, and the tap answered straight away even on a slow connection. Going back to the lobby and moving between rooms stopped reloading the whole page.
2. The family’s colours and lettering are applied before anything is drawn, so there is no flicker of the wrong style on the way in.
3. The photo gallery and the full-size viewer work with a keyboard and a screen reader, and films in the gallery carry captions.
4. Films set to “Only people with the private link” play. That setting used to leave a film dark, so the standing advice had been to avoid it. The museum now fetches the private code from Vimeo itself.
5. For curators: the Cinema Gallery’s Archival checkbox became Primary and its meaning inverted — tick the one film that should open the room, and everything unticked falls to the shelf below. Curator links began opening the right base rather than assuming every family’s tables are laid out identically.

The failure this release closed

A family member opened the museum and saw a pure black page. The entrance was built so its content starts invisible and is revealed by script; when the script never finished, nothing ever appeared. It now reveals itself in plain CSS after a few seconds, so a script that fails can no longer leave someone looking at nothing. We have no error reporting from a visitor’s browser, which means this class of fault reaches us only when somebody tells us.

The Sugahara Museum went live — 25 July 2026

Not a version, but the day that matters most in this list. Everything Brooke and Maíra built in the sandbox became the family’s museum, with three rooms open: the Photo Exhibit, the Cinema Gallery and Story Collections. The Map, Timelines and Family Tree stayed behind their “coming soon” tiles rather than holding the opening back.

This is also the day the change process became real: curate in the sandbox, we review it, it moves live overnight in your time zone with about 48 hours’ notice. See Going Live.

1.3.0 — 4 July 2026

Covers 3 July to 4 July, and finishes work that had been landing through late June.

1. The background sync absorbed the two jobs that ran beside it. Transcription and approval emails now happen in the same pass as everything else, rather than on their own timers.
2. “Sync now” appeared in the top bar, so a curator can pull their own changes through without waiting for the next scheduled pass.
3. A back-to-lobby exit sign in the top bar, because leaving a room had been less obvious than entering one.
4. Every font size in the museum resolves from a named role rather than being set locally, which is what makes a family’s lettering consistent from room to room.
5. Emails got a larger type scale with a 12px floor, on the same reasoning.

1.2.1 — 3 July 2026

A quieting pass over the interpretive layer in the story and cinema rooms: smaller labels, less competing for attention with the work itself.

1.2.0 — 2 July 2026

Covers 9 May to 2 July. The longest window in this list, and the one where the museum stopped being a single room.

1. The Cinema Gallery and Story Collections went live — 8 and 10 June respectively, under the 1.1.0 label, which is exactly the deploy-is-not-a-version case described above.
2. The museum began serving content from its own database rather than reading Airtable on every visit. This is why rooms open quickly, and why a curator’s edits now arrive on a schedule rather than instantly.
3. Photographs and film stills moved to durable storage. Airtable’s own image links expire after a couple of hours; a room that served them directly would go blank without anything appearing to be wrong.
4. The sync started sending a change digest naming what actually moved — new photographs, sets, films, stories — and only when something changed, rather than every six hours regardless.
5. A pre-deploy gate that refuses to ship if the code and the family’s configuration disagree.

Two serious faults in this window

13 June — confidentiality. Two endpoints returned more than they should have: films awaiting moderation could be read, and the list of museums was not scoped to the requester. Both were closed the same day, along with a broader hardening pass over secrets handling and record-id validation.

16 June — uploads failed on the live museum only. Photo submissions returned a platform error page on production while staging worked perfectly, because an image-processing library failed to load and took the whole route down with it before any error handling could run. The library is now loaded lazily, so a failure degrades to “the original photograph is kept” instead of a dead page.

1.1.0 — 9 May 2026

Covers 7 May to 9 May. Visitor access by QR code, so someone standing in front of an exhibition can reach the museum without an account, plus a rework of how families are named internally.

This is the version that stood at the May symposium.

1.0.0 to 1.0.4 — 7 May 2026

The first release. One room.

1. The Photo Exhibit, with its full-size viewer and the wall-plaque layout on larger screens.
2. The entrance and the lobby — the way into a museum and the way between its rooms.
3. Sign-in, with each family’s museum private to that family.
4. Submissions: a relative sends in a photograph, the curator is emailed, and an approval sends the thank-you back automatically.
5. Four patch releases the same day, all polish caught in review: a media badge on single photographs, a subtitle field renamed, per-family corner rounding, and a column-count threshold on wide screens.

Before 1.0.0

Everything earlier is a 0.9.x build. Those existed only on staging and at internal reviews, and no family ever saw one. They are deliberately not listed here: this page is the record of what reached a museum, and none of them did.